Postdoctoral Scholar: Long Range Fiber Sensing on the Seafloor
University of Washington · Seattle, Washington, US
Description A team of faculty, William Wilcock, Brad Lipovsky, Marine Denolle and Shima Abadi, in the School of Oceanography and Department of Earth and Spac...
Job description
Description A team of faculty, William Wilcock, Brad Lipovsky, Marine Denolle and Shima Abadi, in the School of Oceanography and Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington (UW) are seeking a Postdoctoral Scholar for a collaborative project with Nokia Bell Labs to investigate the capabilities of a potentially transformative multi-span distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) technology. The approach relies on high-loss loopback couplers and polarization-resolved optical frequency domain reflectometry to sense beyond the optical repeaters on submarine telecommunication cables with target specifications of 60 Hz sampling rate and 100 m sampling length. The data for this project will come from a 3-month experiment, scheduled for November 2025 – January 2026, on the two cables of the Ocean Observatories Initiative Regional Cabled Array ( https://oceanobservatories.org/regional-cabled-array/ ) that land in Pacific City, Oregon. One cable runs 500 km west to Axial Seamount, while the other extends 350 km onto the incoming plate before looping southward onto the continental slope and shelf off Newport, Oregon. The full dataset will comprise multi-span DAS across the f...