Spending parts of your Bachelor/Master/PhD studies at UNIS?
A student who has been accepted or will be accepted into a Bachelor, Master, or PhD program at his/her home educational institution may apply to complete (parts of) the study (fieldwork/thesis) at UNIS. This requires an UNIS supervisor and a separate application to UNIS. The application form can be downloaded at the bottom of the page.
Admission criteria:
- Student enrolled in a bachelor, master or PhD-program at an approved higher educational institution in Norway or abroad
- The bachelor/master/PhD-project is within UNIS’ research themes
- The student plans to stay at UNIS for at least 3 months continuously
Application deadlines:
- 1 March
- 1 June
- 1 September
- 1 December
Earliest arrival is 1,5 months after the application deadline.
Available guest master student opportunities
Below is a list of available Master projects – if interested please contact the academic staff listed.
Arctic Biology Master projects:
Arctic Technology Bachelor/Master projects:
The Arctic contains large quantities of biological and mineral resources of great commercial and scientific value. Sustainable industrial development and exploitation of biological and mineral resources requires tailored technology and expert knowledge of the region. Arctic technology involves upgrading of well proven technology to suit the Arctic climate or the development of completely different and specialized technology especially adapted to the harsh environmental conditions.
Arctic Geology Master projects:
The unique geology of Svalbard and its present-day cryosphere provide superb opportunities to study geoscience. The Arctic Geology department supervises bachelor-, master and PhD theses in geology and physical geography with a special focus on using Svalbard as a field laboratory. We do this in collaboration with all the Norwegian universities, but also with many universities around the world, so fitting to the different conditions of doing a thesis as regulated by your home university.
You will best get an overview of the specific scientific fields that we supervise theses within by studying the academic content and learning outcomes of the courses we offer. We recommend students to be directly involved in developing their thesis project together with us as supervisors. Therefore, please contact our scientific staff if you like to develop a bachelor, master or PhD thesis study with us. Clearly almost all of the bachelor and master students that we supervise have taken courses at UNIS and in this way got inspired to do thesis work with us as well.
Arctic Geophysics Master projects:
Estimating Svalbard Essential Climate Variables from SWOT measurements
| Description | Associate professor Eero Rinne |
| Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) is a NASA satellite mission launched in 2022. For the first time, it provides interferometric swath altimeter measurements over land and sea surface elevation up to the inclination limit of 78 degrees, allowing estimation of sea ice freeboard as well as glacier elevation on southern part of Spitsbergen. The project includes demonstrating the use of SWOT data to estimate freeboard and glacier elevation change in areas on or close to Spitsbergen. Main research question to be answered is what kind of benefit swath altimetry brings to observations of cryospheric ECV’s present on Svalbard, in comparison to traditional altimetry. The SWOT data shall be compared to other satellite products (such elevation from ICESat-2 and CryoSat-2) as well as in-situ measurements. If possible, the project should include fieldwork at the Svea station during SWOT overpasses. The project shall contribute towards future altimeter satellite missions, primarily the Sentinel-3 Next Generation. The candidate should have a solid background in satellite Earth observation and/or geophysics of the cryosphere – including glaciers, snow, and sea ice.. |
Comparison of effects of energetic electron precipitation descriptions in atmospheric modelling
| Description | Associate professor Noora Partamies |
| Atmosphere and climate model WACCM was recently updated to include an input (forcing) of energetic electron precipitation, which is based on satellite measurements of electron fluxes at certain energies, parametrised as a function of magnetic activity index Ap. Other electron precipitation descriptions have been tried and tested after that, but the general conclusion is that the particle input is not producing enough odd nitrogen (NOx) in the thermosphere. Our new electron description was composed of ground-based observations solely, with the idea that this would provide better spatial and temporal resolution than a fast overpassing satellites do. The model output using this new forcing is now available and this project would compare the evolution of the mesospheric and thermospheric chemistry of the new results with already existing analysis of geomagnetic storms in the literature, for instance the storm in April 2010. The analysis aims at understanding the chemical differences caused by the two electron inputs in different species, at different height ranges and in different phases of the storms of different intensity. Previous study on April 2010 storm to be compared with: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018JA025418 |
Would the bursty precipitation of pulsating aurora include enough soft electrons that would disturb the equivalent current distribution?
| Description | Associate professor Noora Partamies |
| Equivalent currents are currents, which are built to match the measured magnetic disturbances on the ground. They are thus the result of current continuation and Ohm’s law. They describe approximately the divergence-free part of the ionospheric Hall currents, and their curl is then a rough estimate for the field-aligned currents in and out of the ionosphere. Pulsating aurora is known to involve a persistent contribution of high-energy electrons from the radiation belts. At the same time, an auroral emission signature is seen, which also suggests precipitation of energies less than 10 keV. According to recent theories in wave-particle interaction, in particular those of Chorus waves, shows that the waves accelerate particles within a very large energy range. Since the focus on pulsating aurora studies has been on the high energy precipitation, which may affect the neutral atmosphere, little is done on the lower-energy precipitation part. The aim of the project is thus, to investigate if this type of precipitation affects the distribution and behaviour of equivalent currents. Lists of pulsating aurora events, and tools to calculate and visualise equivalent currents, are readily available. Study on electrodynamics changes due to pulsating aurora: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2009JA014683 Review on pulsating aurora: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-019-0629-3 |
Auroral omega band drift speeds
| Description | Associate professor Noora Partamies |
| Omega bands are known to show up in the recovery phase of a substorm and drift eastward. They are large features and claim to be rare. There are a number of case studies of these things available, and some of them estimate the eastward drift speed but there is no proper overview of the propagation behaviour. This project would look into the problem with automatic drift velocity detection by so called optical flow method, which is based on difference between 2 consecutive images. Assuming the shape of the auroral structure remains the same without too big a change in its brightness the difference gives the speed of propagation. The algorithm is called Horn-Schunck and exists in all major programming languages. Its outcome needs to be validated and investigated. An omega band event list also exists (in the paper https://www.ann-geophys.net/35/1069/2017/). The final product of omega band speeds could be compared to ionospheric convection velocities measured by SuperDARN as well as correlated with the current magnetic activity strength and solar wind driving. |
Application forms
- Application form for Bachelor students
- Application form for Master students
- Application form for PhD students