Facilities

The Department has an excellent range of laboratory and field equipment. Technical staff are available to help graduate researchers when their research requires their specialist skills and equipment.

The Department has its own IT staff and offers students support in respect of hardware, software and network issues. Inter-Departmental PGR training is available through the implementation of a College-wide Graduate School.

We have closed environment facilities for exploring controls on plant ecological functioning, while our indoor ground penetrating radar test facility enables us to develop remote methods for sub-surface and soil moisture investigation. Our earth surface materials laboratory supports the physical and chemical analysis of water, soils, sediments, and other samples (e.g. via laser particle sizing and ion chromatography), and a totally new, 50% larger, laboratory is currently being constructed.

In 2006 we established a network of London roof-top atmospheric monitoring stations and a NERC-supported ‘GeoNETCAST’ satellite data reception and processing facilitya suite of radiometers, multi-wavelength imaging devices, and UV and IR Fourier spectrometers, to support field measurements in remote sensing science.