1. Faculty of Environment
  2. People
  3. Profile

Dr Ruth Amey

Profile

I am an experienced project manager, passionate about working in the interface between academia, policy and industry. I have particular expertise in the environmental / space sector and have coordinated projects funded by the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, Natural Environmental Research Council, UK Space Agency and the European Space Agency.

I manage VERIFY, a £5 million research project funded by the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) that sits within the Forecasting Tipping Points programme. Verify will build Digital Twins - computer simulations trained or merged with real-world data – of past Greenland ice sheet and North Atlantic subpolar gyre tipping to evaluate the performance of new technologies developed by the programme. VERIFY will hone observational systems, physical process-based models and early warning detection algorithmns against real-world realisations of tipping behaviour to build a robust and trusted Early Warning System.

Research interests

Previously in my PhD and postdoc I investigated earthquakes and active tectonics using satellite data. My postdoctoral research focussed on Earth Observation and seismic hazard in Tien Shan, Central Asia (particularly Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan). Many cities around the world are potentially at earthquake risk from buried faults that have been hidden by the expansion of the city. Whilst the hazard and risk due to larger faults is often more widely appreciated, these smaller, subtle faults may potentially be more damaging due to their proximity to the cities, even if the earthquakes that occur on them are much smaller. In my research, we used high resolution optical satellite data (Pleiades, SPOT) to make elevation models (DEMs) across Almaty, Kazakhstan and Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to identify subtle faults from small changes in the heights of the surface. Working with the Global Earthquake Model and the OpenQuake engine I modelled the hazard (ground shaking) and risk (damage, fatalities, economic cost) that would be associated with different earthquake scenarios. I  undertook fieldwork in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to map faults in the field to verify the DEMs, and have hosted PhD students from the Bishkek Institute of Seismology, Kyrgyzstan at Leeds. With this I created training material to teach the use of OpenQuake.

In my PhD research I have worked on improving earthquake slip inversion methods using InSAR and GPS data (download here – The Fractal Nature of Fault Slip and Its Incorporation into Earthquake Slip Inversions). After large, continental earthquakes distributed slip inversions are frequently performed to model the magnitude and local of slip that occurs at depth on the fault plane. These inversions are frequently regularised, most often by smoothing, but this smoothing does not necessarily reflect the physical nature of faulting. Due to the evidence that suggestions many features of earthquakes and faulting, including fault slip, shows fractal properties we incorporate this self-similarity into earthquake slip inversions through von Karman smoothing, using Bayesian methods. I have also quantified fault surface roughness in the Italian Apennines by mapping fault surfaces using terrestrial laser scanner. I am also interested in co-seismic landsliding and my masters thesis focussed on whether we could use landslides in the Tien Shan, Central Asia, as palaeoseismic indicators.

Software

Download slipBERI - a Bayesian slip inversion code incorporating fractal properties through the von Karman correlation

Invited conference talks:

Qualifications

  • PRINCE2® Foundation Certificate in Project Management (2021)
  • PhD, University of Leeds (2014-2018)
  • MEarthSci, Earth Sciences, University of Oxford (2010-2014)

Research groups and institutes

  • Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science
  • Institute of Geophysics and Tectonics