Lucie Delobel is a PhD student at the Department of Geography. She is interested in aeolian geomorphology, the study of wind driven surface processes, such as sand transport and deposition into bedforms on Mars and Earth.

She holds a BA in Earth Sciences from Trinity College Dublin and an MSc in Climate Change from King’s. During her bachelor’s degree, Lucie studied dark dune spots, which are seasonal features created by the cryo-venting of the surface CO2 ice at the Martian poles.

For her master’s dissertation, she researched future dune dynamics under a changing wind regime across the globe. 

Research

Thesis title: 'Determining the local wind regime from dune ripple patterns on the surface of Mars and Earth using Machine Learning.'

Sand transport by wind is the dominant force shaping the contemporary surface of Mars and is poorly understood. Ripples are small bedform features found in interdune areas or on sand dunes, oriented in the local wind direction. So far, these small sand features have only been identified on the surface of Mars and on Earth. Monitoring ripple patterns across the surface of Mars would improve our knowledge of local wind regimes.

Because manually mapping ripples is time consuming, using an automated mapping method would enable efficiently surveying large areas of the surface of Mars. This project will test the performance of Deep Learning for mapping ripple patterns on a test site on Earth before applying it to Mars.

PhD supervision

• Principal supervisor: Andreas Baas
• Secondary supervisor: Emma Tebbs

Further details

See Lucie's research profile