Download Summary of the ideas 2015 cut-off

Ideas 2015
Ideas submitted as potential highlight topics
Title
Modelling and
forecasting the Earth's
radiation belts
Space Weather
influence on the
Earth’s climate system
Quantitative synergy
of “big data” with
conventional
observations and large
computational models
for hazard prediction
and risk mitigation
Summary
We are increasingly reliant on satellites for a variety of applications including
telecommunications, navigation, positioning, Earth-observation and defence. The
majority of these satellites are exposed to energetic electrons in the Earth’s
radiation belts. These so-called “killer” electrons damage satellites and can vary by
orders of magnitude on timescales as short as hours. This variability is controlled
by particle source, transport and loss processes. Understanding and modelling this
dynamic environment is essential to help protect our space assets. This highlight
topic proposes to increase our understanding of the satellite environment by
assessing the role of wave particle interactions in the acceleration and loss of
radiation belt electrons. Specifically, the role of magnetosonic waves in accelerating
electrons to high energies at geocentric distances from 3-7 Earth radii (RE) needs
to be understood and quantified. Closer in, at geocentric distances of 1.1-3 RE,
electron loss due to three different types of radio wave needs to be assessed and
quantified. The results will improve our understanding of near-Earth space and lead
to improved radiation belt modelling and forecasting. The results will lead to
improved space situational awareness, enabling satellite operators to respond to
space weather hazards and facilitate post-event analysis, enabling satellite engineers
and insurers to better understand the root cause of satellite anomalies.
Space Weather couples to the Earth’s climate system through the perturbation of
large-scale, natural circulation patterns that exist from the ground to about 90 km
altitude. In the northern hemisphere the coupling takes place most strongly
through the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) which influences wintertime
weather patterns in Europe and North America. In order to be able to utilize the
understanding of this connection we need to combine knowledge of the energy
deposited into the atmosphere from space weather processes with robust whole
atmosphere modelling that includes ion and neutral chemistry at 50-90 km
altitudes. We need to understand what energy is being deposited into the
atmosphere by space weather processes, be able to incorporate the energy
deposition mechanisms in whole atmosphere coupled-climate models, and
integrate realistic model capability from the surface to around 150 km altitude.
Only by undertaking whole atmosphere modelling that includes correctly specified
input mechanisms will we be able to develop this topic area to have a useful
predictive capability for the wider society.
Quantitative synergy of “big data” with conventional observations and large
computational models will transform resilience to a range of environmental
hazards (e.g., floods, droughts, coastal erosion, forest fires). Conventional
observing systems tend to be purpose-built, resulting in structured datasets and
knowledge of their uncertainty (e.g., the new Sentinel-1 satellite mission).
However, there are burgeoning sources of unstructured data from social media,
crowdsourcing and independent sensor networks (e.g., smartphones, CCTV, cars),
which may be intermittent and of unknown fidelity. A new, general framework is
needed to allow quantitative use of unstructured data alongside conventional
observations. A particular problem posed by opportunistic datasets is that the data
quality is not homogeneous. Hence, new methods for characterizing and treating
errors are vital for quantitative comparison of observations with models.
Importantly, it is the fusion (or data assimilation) of structured and unstructured
data with state-of-the-art computational models that will challenge our scientific
understanding of processes and yield improved tools for hazard forecasting and
risk management. For example, observations may be assimilated to evaluate model
performance; choose model structures or parameter values and estimate the state
of the real system to keep predictions on track. Both the models and datasets are
large, requiring the development of fast computational algorithms for practical use.
This research programme would establish the evidence base for future policy, such
What is the single
most important threat
to the river
environment?
Radiation risk
reduction for satellite
launch, operations and
insurance
Improved forecasting
of severe space
weather: making the
essential scientific
advances
Behaviour of marine
organisms in turbulent
environments –
implications for
deployment of marine
renewable tidal-
as how to adapt monitoring networks to work alongside “big data” and provide
the best value for money.
Given our limited resources which single factor should we tackle to have the
greatest positive impact on wildlife species and populations in our rivers? Rivers
run through agricultural, urban and industrial zones but which of these human
activities most restrict population abundance or diversity? Should we focus our
efforts on reducing nutrient loss or sediments from farming? Should it be a
reduction in restrictive features in rivers? Could it be further reductions in
phosphorus from effluent? Should it be the adoption of end of pipe solutions to
remove organic compounds from effluent? Or the creation/re-creation of suitable
nursery habitats? All would have their advocates and ideally we could afford to do
everything but this is not realistic. Can instead the NERC Community find an
objective method to rank these challenges by their recorded impact on wildlife? If
we could identify which challenge was having the biggest impact then we would
have a rational basis for the most successful investment in protecting our river
wildlife.
In 2014 Boeing introduced a revolutionary new way of launching large commercial
satellites. By using electrical instead of chemical propulsion they have almost
halved the cost of launch. However, instead of taking 10 days to reach
geostationary orbit it now takes 200 to 300 days. During this time the satellites
are exposed to much higher radiation levels than before and are subject to a much
higher risk of radiation damage. The problem is that radiation levels can increase
suddenly during magnetic storms, and once elevated they can take days or months
to decay depending on location. Consequently, there is a very large uncertainty in
the radiation levels that should be used at design stage and significant risk of
radiation damage during operations. This highlight topic is to understand the
source, transport, acceleration and loss processes that govern the variability of the
radiation environment, to forecast the radiation using global models and to
determine the realistic worst-case environment in order to assess the risk of
satellite damage. The research will utilize existing networks of radars and
magnetic field observations across the Arctic and Antarctic, and combine them
with scientific satellite data and computer models to support growth of the UK
space industry which is now adopting this new method of launching satellites.
Earth's magnetic environment provides the protection needed to allow satellite
communication, power transmission, aviation and navigation, but all these areas are
threatened by 'space weather' events caused by material ejected from the Sun
interacting with Earth's magnetic field. Severe space weather ranks alongside
'heatwaves' and 'heavy snow' as major natural risks to the UK. Such an event,
though rare, could cause a disastrous widespread electricity failure, destroy key
satellites, and cause severe health risks to astronauts and passengers on cross
polar flights. Persistent low level space weather variability is also hazardous, by
reducing the integrity of communication signals and the lifetime of electronic
infrastructure. From 2014, the 24-hr space-weather forecasting from the Met
Office now provides useful short range information on impending events.
However, large gaps exist in our scientific understanding of Earth’s magnetic
environment, obscuring detail on these short range forecasts, and in fact entirely
preventing critical medium and long-range forecasting. We propose a major push
to close this gap, building on the UK's strong research base in this field. The
primary aims are to develop understanding and to build realistic models of the
Earth’s magnetic environment. Attaining these goals will require development of
better techniques to process and extract information from both existing and
current ground and space-based data.
The UK is in the process of testing a range of offshore submerged marine energy
renewable devices with a view to developing large arrays. Such devices
(underwater turbines, wings etc.) will be deployed in areas of high current flow. At
the present stage developers and regulators are struggling with evaluating likely
impacts of these arrays on marine ecosystems. Key environmental issues are what
the effect of such devices might be on marine organisms which use these
stream devices
Asymmetric interhemispheric heating as
a fundamental control
on climate and the
global water cycle
Developing and derisking offshore
environmental
monitoring for CCS
Measuring, modelling
and forecasting the
far-field consequences
of volcanic activity
New Insights into the
Space Weather
environments as part of their foraging space. There is evidence that both seabirds
and marine mammals are attracted to such areas at certain states of the tide to
forage. However, the distribution and behaviour of prey (forage fish, larger
zooplankton) has hardly been studied in these environments because of the
challenges of sampling using traditional techniques. However, a range of new
approaches including imaging sonar, improved acoustic detection and cheap
underwater video can now be used in these habitats. Therefore research is
urgently required on the distribution and behaviour of marine organisms, and in
particular forage fish, in these high-energy environments.
Asymmetric heating between the northern and southern hemisphere is emerging
as a fundamental control on Earth’s climate, in particular the hydrological cycle and
the position of monsoon systems, of vital importance to billions of people. It links
past, present and future climate change, involving a wide range of observational,
theoretical and modelling methodologies and spans multiple disciplines including
paleoclimate, atmospheric dynamics, oceanography, radiative forcing, seasonaldecadal forecasting and climate change prediction and impacts. Through improved
understanding of inter-hemispheric heating, its determining factors and influences
on weather, climate and societies, there is the potential for a number of major
advances. These include understanding past controls on civilizations, on
interpreting current regional changes in precipitation patterns and improving
systematic and substantial biases in climate model simulations. Resulting potential
improvements in the global model representation of monsoons, tropical cyclones,
cloud characteristics, sea surface temperatures and ocean-atmosphere heat
exchanges will ultimately enable more accurate seasonal-decadal forecasts and
future projections of how the regional water cycle will change and impact societies
in response to continued anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gas and particle
pollution.
With the imminent advent of large scale Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)
operations under UK shelf seas, the UK must be ready to fulfil best environmental
practice as required by European directives. We propose a program topic that will
support operational CCS in the UK, lever against EU initiatives under Horizon
2020, and further develop the UK’s global leadership in marine CCS. In particular,
there is an urgent need to develop and test best practice for shallow offshore
monitoring including marine baseline acquisition, flow characterization and
quantification and environmental impact assessment. Scientific development in
sediment physics and biogeochemistry, flux detection, biological sensitivities to
prolonged exposure, modelling and tracer application are also required.
Furthermore, this work will contribute to societal understanding of energy options
in the face of climate change, thereby facilitating the necessary transition to a low
carbon economy.
Volcanic ash is an environmental hazard with a large footprint, and chronic effects
that may last long after an eruption has ceased. Volcanic ash hazards may impact
global air transport systems and international supply chains; critical infrastructure,
and life-support systems; and have both acute and long-term impacts on livelihoods
and human health. The 2010 ‘Iceland Ash’ eruption led to global GDP losses of
$4.7 bn; and many of the world’s major cities (including Mexico City, Tokyo and
Singapore) are at risk from future volcanic ash crises.
Empirical knowledge of volcanic ash hazards, and its impacts, has grown
significantly in the past decade. However, there are no readily accessible tools or
techniques for forecasting the consequences of future volcanic ash impacts; or for
the rapid real-time monitoring, measurement and amelioration of the impacts of
ash fallout and deposition during volcanic eruptions. This focused call aims to
deliver a step change in our capacity to measure, model and forecast the far-field
consequences of volcanic ash, and thereby to improve global resilience to this
critical volcanic hazard.
Space weather links solid Earth, atmospheric, ionospheric and magnetospheric
processes providing cross-disciplinary research opportunities on a natural hazard
Impact on the UK
National Grid
Marine Glaciers in the
Earth System
Quantifying the
2015/2016 El Niño
and its environmental
impacts using models
and data
Methane emissions
from beneath the
Arctic Ocean: Do
they matter?
now established on the National Risk Register. In this Highlight Topic we focus on
the rapid, high amplitude geomagnetic field variations, caused by space weather,
that drive damaging Geomagnetically Induced Currents (GIC) through conducting
networks such as power grids, pipelines and railways. Though existing UK GIC
models are recognized for their geophysical detail, new insights are needed on the
science underpinning these models. For example, what is the appropriate spatial
and temporal characterisation of ionosphere electrical currents in respect of GIC,
what can we learn from the limited verification of modelled UK geoelectromagnetic fields, and what is the best 3D model of subsurface electrical
conductivity? Furthermore, industry needs GIC forecasts to prepare for impacts
on electricity transmission. However GIC forecasting is a ‘hard’ geophysics
problem, because of the non-linearities of the coupled Earth system, driven as it is
by the solar wind. We therefore propose in this Topic to enhance our geophysical
understanding of how the UK near-surface and subsurface responds to space
weather. This will require more sophisticated modelling and monitoring and will
ultimately lead to tools for assessing space weather impact on grounded
infrastructures like the National Grid, together with industry and other partners.
Direct line-of-sight between ice sheets, global warming and sea level rise is
unambiguous. Glaciers and the ice-sheets that feed them cover 10% of the Earth
surface and lock-in 75% of the Earth’s fresh water. As the Earth warms, ice melts;
partial melt and runoff from this vast frozen reservoir will dominate future global
sea level rise. Nowhere is ice-sheet behaviour more uncertain than where it meets
the ocean. Here glacier dynamics are influenced by both ocean and atmosphere;
coupled systems themselves with enormous ranges of internal and interactive time
and space variation. Global temperature change to date has been most rapid in the
Arctic, and in particular over Greenland and northeastern Canada. Greenland’s ice
sheet is vast and, unlike other ice sheets, is losing mass at the fastest rate ever
measured. The focus of this highlight topic is to join international efforts to
understand the behaviour of Greenland’s marine terminating ice-sheet and outlet
glaciers in the context of global atmospheric and basin-scale ocean-climate
variability.
The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an irregular mode of climate
variability, characterized by changes in sea surface temperature gradients over the
tropical Pacific with associated changes in atmospheric dynamics. The warming
phase of this oscillation, El Niño, is associated with a band of warm water that
develops over the eastern central equatorial Pacific. El Niño has environmental,
societal, economic and political consequences that are immediate for countries
bordering the tropical Pacific (agriculture and fishing over the east and drought
over Australasia) and far-reaching, global impacts through atmospheric
perturbations (e.g., anomalous rainfall and associated flooding in California). The
last major El Niño was in 1997/1998 when Earth system models, in situ
measurement technology and Earth Observation data, and data assimilation
methods were much less mature than they are today, although some in situ
measurement networks have deteriorated over this period. All major seasonal
forecast centres are projecting for 2015/16 an El Niño that is equal or greater (and
potentially more damaging) than the 1997/1998 event, which increased mortality
rates of tens of thousands of people from exposure to elevated air pollutant levels
and caused an estimated $20 billion of global damage. With improvements to data
and models over the past two decades, the NERC community is well placed to
exploit these tools to better quantify the size, position and structure of El
Niño and its manifold impacts and to use this event to confront and develop the
latest Earth system models that are used to project future climate scenarios.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and can be stored in ocean sediments in a
solid form called hydrate that is stable at high pressures and low temperatures.
Large volumes of methane hydrate are believed to be stored in continental margin
sediments and submarine permafrost and these stores could be destabilised by a
warming ocean, leading to methane emissions, a potential positive feedback in
global climate change, and an intensification of ocean acidification and
Projecting sea level
from the open ocean
to the UK coast
Improving regional
climate change
projections: the
impact of orography
Fingerprinting
magmatic-hosted ore
deposits: A systems
approach
deoxygenation. Such a process has been invoked to explain the abrupt addition of
large volumes of carbon to the atmosphere during ancient episodes of rapid
climate change. Hydrate dissociation may also result in instability of slope
sediments and large tsunami-generating landslides. Arctic hydrates are particularly
sensitive to climate change because temperatures are expected to change more
rapidly at high latitudes and because they are present in shallower water depths.
During the last 5 years, voluminous methane fluxes into the Arctic Ocean have
been identified west of Svalbard and on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. Whether the
observed emissions mark the start of a large-scale hydrate dissociation event
remains controversial.
Increased coastal flooding due to changing sea levels is a significant threat to
society. The IPCC regional sea level projections are based on global climate
models (GCMs) that have inadequate representation of near-coastal effects. The
Hadley Centre aims to address this short-coming by working towards coupling
global climate and coastal models, but current GCMs cannot resolve the
connections between the open ocean and shelf seas or important on-shelf
processes or adequately reproduce the internal variability present. This strategic
research programme aims to better understand the processes of ocean-shelf
coupling plus local coastal effects. The overarching objective is to develop
improved coastal sea level projections taking intrinsic variability and the impact of
extremes into account, making use of the newest generation of fine scale ocean
models, which allows a full coupling from deep ocean to coast, and to confront the
latest remote and in-situ observations with state-of-the-art modelling at high
resolution. By assessing the drivers of recent changes we can generate shorter
time-scale projections with the uncertainty levels needed for coastal adaptation
decisions.
Over the past two decades there have been great advances in our ability to predict
changes in climate on spatial scales from hundreds to thousands of kilometres.
While such broad-scale predictions provide a valuable framework for formulating
climate policy, detailed assessment of the impacts of climate change and the
development of adaptation strategies in many sectors, for instance agriculture,
water resources and transport, requires predictions on much finer scales – maybe
down to one kilometre or less. At these fine spatial scales both the mean climate
and the occurrence of extreme weather events (e.g. damaging winds, extreme
rainfall, freezing temperatures) are strongly controlled by the interaction of largescale atmospheric circulation with topography on length scales of 1-100
kilometres, i.e. mesoscale orography.
In parallel with developments in climate prediction, there has been a huge increase
in our understanding of the impacts of mesoscale orography on weather at the
local scale through phenomena such as cold-air pooling, downslope windstorms
and orographic enhancement of precipitation. This has largely been driven by the
need for improved numerical weather prediction (NWP) and has come about
through a combination of observational studies, increased theoretical
understanding and the development of improved models. It is now timely to bring
together our understanding of these local processes with large-scale climate
projections to deliver improved projections of climate and high-impact weather at
the local scale.
There have been significant parallel advances in the study of mineral systems and
magmatic processes. This highlight topic aims to integrate them in the
development of new tools for mineral exploration. The mineral systems approach
focuses on identifying the large-scale processes that act as precursors to mineral
deposit genesis, described as transient events resulting from a geological trigger—
the challenge remains in linking the mineral systems paradigm to measurable
geological observations. However, recent improvements in analytical techniques
have revolutionized the study of magmatic processes. Microanalysis of radiogenic
and stable isotopes, and of trace elements in igneous and hydrothermal minerals,
has yielded precise ages of crystallization and mineralization; constraints on the
Determining the
effects of the global
atmospheric electric
circuit on
environmental change
Quantifying Blue
Carbon ecosystem
services and assessing
human impacts on
coastal carbon
assimilation, transfer
and storage
Impact of extreme
events on natural
capital – a more
holistic understanding
rates of chemical changes from measurement of diffusion profiles; new insights into
the role of volatiles and records of changing physico-chemical conditions during
the evolution of magmatic systems. This proposal brings these approaches
together to develop (i) reliable proxies for distinguishing magmatic rocks
associated with mineralization from those that are not, and (ii) robust indicators of
proximal mineralization from magmatic rocks and/or younger sediments obtained
in drill core. In 2012 global exploration expenditure was over $20 billion
representing a footprint of over 3000 sites. Typically, this effort only results in an
average of 20 new deposits per year. Reducing this effort by 20%, through a
mineral systems approach, will significantly improve regional and district-scale
exploration successes, and reduce the net economic and environmental cost of
deposit discovery.
There is now convincing evidence that weather and climate are influenced in a way
that is yet to be recognized and assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, or included in any General Circulation Model. This
underexplored influence involves solar modulation of the global atmospheric
electric circuit (GEC). It is well established that magnetic fluctuations from the Sun
cause changes in the electric field in the polar ionosphere and consequently of a
downward current Jz to the ground. It is now also apparent that these changes are
linked to variations in temperature and pressure in the polar troposphere, and to
changes in planetary wave structure. These effects are large enough to affect
weather forecasts but the longer-term climate impacts are currently unknown.
The missing link in our understanding is the mechanism by which the downward
current affects temperature and pressure. A strong candidate is electrical charging
effects on cloud droplet concentrations and size distributions. Droplet distribution
is known to affect energy conversions between latent heat and kinetic energy and
the partitioning of the short-wave and long-wave radiative transfer.
Thus our idea is to focus UK research expertise in the GEC, aerosols and clouds
to test and understand the hypothesized GEC mechanisms to a level sufficient for
them to be included in a GCM, such that their impact on weather and climate can
be more fully assessed.
Despite their relatively small spatial extent, both nationally and globally, vegetated
coastal ecosystems (kelp, mangrove forests, seagrass beds, and salt marshes) and
their associated marine sediment sinks are disproportionately important in
sequestering carbon dioxide in comparison to terrestrial ecosystems. Vegetated
coastal habitats assimilate carbon 40 times faster than tropical forests and their
total contribution to long-term sequestration is comparable to that in terrestrial
ecosystems. As vegetated coastal habitats are the most carbon-rich ecosystems in
the world and can sequester and store carbon for millennia, they should be
prominent in strategies to mitigate climate change. However, our ability to manage
and protect these natural coastal carbon sinks is impaired by our limited
understanding of the abiotic and biotic factors that promote carbon assimilation
and long-term storage. In the UK, vegetated coastal habitats (primarily kelp forests,
salt marshes and seagrass meadows) serve critical functions as both repositories
for biodiversity and major sources and sinks of assimilated carbon. Consequently,
they are likely play a key role in climate regulation. The mechanisms underpinning
carbon storage, remineralisation and transfer to long-term coastal sediment stores,
through coastal vegetated habitats in the UK are, however, almost entirely
unknown. Combining contemporary analytical techniques with targeted, broadscale ecological sampling will allow for a robust assessment (and ultimately
valuation) of the importance of vegetated coastal habitats in natural carbon
sequestration and provide significant impact in terms of potential climate change
mitigation strategies.
The global environment is changing rapidly and human activity is the biggest cause.
Yet both our wealth as a nation and our individual wellbeing depend critically on
the environment and on improving understanding of the value of natural assets and
the vital goods and services they provide. Reports by the Natural Capital
Committee (NCC), show how we have undervalued our natural resources –
leading to ongoing loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystems, with failure
to value water for environmental needs playing a key role in this process.
This proposal will help address a critical need to improve predictions and de-risk
the potential impact of extreme weather events (floods, water scarcity and high
temperatures) on biodiversity, ecosystem goods and services and the sustainable
use of our natural capital assets.
Lightning Discharges –
Initiation,
Development, Impact
Deep-sea habitats and
their response to
climate in UK
overseas territories
Hydroclimate change:
from the past to the
Current research on droughts and floods, and research on natural capital and
ecosystem services is done largely independently with little holistic understanding
of the impact of extreme events and the potential for nature based solutions.
There is a need is to improve current modelling capability and the knowledge for
decision support for long term planning purposes and to optimize multiple benefits
from investments based on a more holistic approach. To help achieve this goal we
need a better understanding of how water is regulated at a catchment scale taking
account of the physical and biological factors that influence the process.
Lightning discharges remain an enigma to date despite intensive research. Whilst
lightning discharges are used as an indicator for now-casting severe weather in
meteorological operational services, the initiation of lightning discharges inside
thunderclouds, their spatial and temporal development and consecutive discharge
processes above thunderclouds, known as sprites, blue jets, gigantic jets, elves,
terrestrial gamma ray flashes and terrestrial electron flashes, are the subject of
intense research. These processes have an impact on energetic charged particles in
the Earth’s radiation belts resulting from space weather variability. Lightning
discharges are listed in the UK National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies several lightning casualties are recorded every year across the UK and lightning is a
threat to offshore oil platforms, windfarms and national air traffic services. The
now- and forecasting of electrical storms is assisted by lightning detection
networks operated by the Met Office and EA Technology and novel lightning
detection sensors are developed by Bristol Industrial and Research Associates Ltd.
However, within the next decade three space missions will enable the
development of novel strategies toward the now- and forecasting of lightning
discharges - the ASIM payload (ESA) on the International Space Station, the
microsatellite TARANIS (CNES) and the next generation of geostationary satellites
MTG (EUMETSAT), all of which will carry optical lightning detectors into space to
push forward the boundaries of knowledge on the initiation, development, and the
impact of lightning discharges.
Despite covering vast areas of our oceans, being rich in species as well as hosting
hotspots of high endemism, the deep sea is poorly studied. Deep-sea ecosystems
harbour fisheries and have potential for natural product discovery; in addition the
deep sea contains natural resources, including oil and gas, and has the potential for
mineral extraction. At the same time, deep-sea habitats host carbonate-forming
species that record the environmental history of our ocean basins. The UK’s
overseas territories include isolated islands with extensive, complex and potentially
biodiverse marine ecosystems spanning latitudes from the tropics (e.g. Ascension
Island) to polar regions (e.g. South Georgia). Several of these territories have been
declared, or may in the future be declared, Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), but
there is little knowledge of the habitats they comprise, and even less about how
these habitats may evolve under future climate change. For example, only 3% of
the Chagos Marine Reserve in the Indian Ocean has been documented, with
almost no information on the deep sea. Here, it is proposed to use UK Overseas
Territories (OT) as a focus for understanding the drivers and evolution of deepsea habitats, specifically establishing the potential impacts of a changing
environment on deep-sea ecosystems and to simultaneously improve the
knowledge base for management and conservation of these ecosystems as part of a
global network of MPAs.
Variability in seasonal and decadal precipitation patterns, such as those associated
with the monsoons or the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), affects the
future
Bringing a focus to
space weather: how
terrestrial processes
extract and
concentrate energy
from the solar wind
Long-term landscapescale ecology
experimentation
security of billions of people through the disruption it causes to water and food
supply, disease and the damage that results from droughts or floods. Unforced
decadal-centennial timescale variability is observed to be significant, but remains
poorly constrained. In addition, with atmospheric pCO2 now at 400 ppm and
predicted to rise to ~800 ppm by 2100 (concentrations last present over 34
million years ago), drastic future changes in global climate are inevitable. Accurately
predicting how major precipitation patterns will change in the near future, in terms
of amount, seasonality and distribution of rainfall, is one of the most pressing
challenges faced by climate modellers, and subsequently policy makers. Verification
targets for climate models can be attained by accessing information in the palaeorecord, since it can provide estimates of precipitation during past analogue time
periods or during major transitions. New proxies and high-resolution geological
archives that permit palaeo-precipitation reconstruction with unprecedented
confidence are becoming increasingly available. These include novel geochemical
and paleontological records from deep-sea and lake sediments, corals, tree-rings
and peat bogs. It remains a considerable challenge, however, to quantitatively test
and improve models using records of palaeo-precipitation due to uncertainties in
both the reconstructions and past climate forcing. To realise the full potential of
this timely advance in palaeo-reconstruction techniques, better integration is
therefore needed between the modelling community and those generating proxy
records of precipitation. The UK has the potential to be world leading in this area
because of its pre-eminence in both palaeoclimatology and climate modelling.
How does the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere focus energy from the Sun to
produce severe space weather conditions on Earth, sufficient to disrupt societally
critical technologies? The Sun drives a variety of space weather phenomena that
can influence terrestrial environments. Some, e.g. solar flares, distribute energy
evenly across Earth producing modest effects whose spatial variation can be
described by simple geometry. But the energy inflow from other solar phenomena,
e.g. notably solar wind disturbances such as coronal mass ejections, is strongly
focused by terrestrial processes, in both space and time, such that the power flux
into the upper atmosphere may be several thousand times that in the solar wind.
This focusing can produce locally severe effects including rapid changes in the
geomagnetic field and strong spatial gradients in the density of ionisation in the
upper atmosphere (ionosphere). The first of these can disrupt operation of power
grids, railways, pipelines, whilst the second can disrupt radio signals critical to use
of many satellite applications, notably satellite timing and location (e.g. GPS), but
also many satcom systems, as well as tracking systems widely used by shipping and
civil aviation. A better understanding of the terrestrial processes that convert solar
wind energy into severe space weather is essential, both for better modelling of
“how bad can it get” in severe events, and also forecasting those events.
Progress in spatial ecology requires the establishment and maintenance of longterm, large-scale field experiments to study the ecological effects of landscape
management. Landscape ecology is a field of growing importance, due to evidence
that many ecological processes of theoretical and applied interest (e.g. local
population dynamics, community composition, biodiversity and conservation) are
strongly affected by their wider landscape context. The dynamics of populations
and communities play out over large spatial and temporal scales, and large-scale
and long-term experiments will greatly improve our mechanistic and causal
understanding of the processes governing them. Results from such work could
help guide landscape management for conservation or ecosystem service provision.
Experiments on this scale would be challenging to organise: they would require
cooperation of substantial public or private landowners over decadal or longer
timescales, and provisions should be considered to allow successful projects to
apply for follow-on funding to monitor long-term experimental outcomes. With
such provisions in place, the experiments will allow a step change in British
landscape ecology, and potentially help provide a firmer evidential basis for
conservation biology, agri-ecology habitat restoration and related spatial ecology
issues.
Biodiversity Search
and Translation
Engines for Innovation
Effective and efficient search and translation engines tools are required to harvest
the biodiversity information dormant in biological texts and specimens in museums
and herbaria for the creation, implementation and exploitation of new natureinspired processes, structures and functions for the UK industry. This activity
conciliates responsible and sustainable exploitation of natural resources and
increased productivity with expectation of increased human society prosperity and
quality of life.
The transfer of knowledge from the field of biology, zoology and botany to
engineering is complex due to the dispersion and specialization of nature-based
knowledge, the high level of required cooperation between experts from different
disciplines (biologists, zoologists, botanists, museum curators, chemists, physicists,
and engineers) as well as the lack of mutual understanding of their respective
terminology and research cultures. It is crucial for all relevant disciplines to have
the tools to exchange their accumulated knowledge and ideas for biomimetic
discoveries and developments.
This proposed knowledge infrastructure in biomimetics bridges the gap between
engineers’ needs and biological data by adapting a series of informatics tools which
include ontology explorer for biomimetics database, intelligent image retrieval
associated to botanical and zoological images and interrogation of databases using
natural language.
Atmospheric oxygen:
its decline,
uncertainties, and
horizon of availability
Quantifying North
Atlantic Ecosystem
Response to
Environmental Forcing
New understanding of
atmospheric reactive
nitrogen chemistry
and its impacts
This idea spans unashamedly across the traditional funding boundaries of the
NERC, BBSRC, AHRC and EPSRC.
Atmospheric oxygen is declining by a small fraction every year, most likely due to
increased use of fossil fuels (IPCC AR5). This decline is estimated to be nonlinear
(following the nonlinear increase of carbon emissions), but the horizon of
dangerous depletion is difficult to quantify due to the short (~20 years) observed
data and uncertainties, modelling and technological. Depletion of oxygen will
accelerate with industrial expansion and current intensification of wildfires due to
climate change. Particularly important, further oxygen depletion will occur due to
growing industrial processes, such as Haber-Bosch (fertilisers), involving materials
and products processing and manufacturing using natural gas and oil, as well as
catalytic oxidation. Joint multidisciplinary efforts are necessary to model
atmospheric oxygen projections, alongside the needs to maintain observational
programmes and assess new industrial technologies that may deplete atmospheric
oxygen.
In the North Atlantic, ecosystems and their physical and chemical environments
are changing. Since the early 1990s to around 2012, the subpolar gyre contracted,
boundary currents decelerated, and comparatively warm and salty waters from the
Biscay region surged northward into the Iceland and Rockall Basins. The change in
water masses also brought a change in the nutrients supporting the local
ecosystems. Observations of silicate concentration in the upper-ocean (south of
Iceland, in the Labrador Sea, off the Norwegian coast, and the Rockall Basin) show
a decline over the past decade. Is diatom production, the base of the ecosystem,
also reducing and/or shifting its biogeography? Concomitant changes to types,
ranges and distributions of economic fisheries have also occurred. It is presently
unknown exactly why and how ecosystems are responding to inter-annual to
decadal changes in forcing. In summary, the hypothesis is that the North Atlantic
subpolar gyre circulation has the potential to regulate ecosystems, and thus impact
a major component of UK food production and security.
Reactive nitrogen compounds in the atmosphere are a major source of air
pollution, governing the formation of ozone, peroxyacetyl nitrate, and nitrate
aerosol particles. They influence oxidation processes through control of OH
radicals and aerosol nucleation through volatile amines, and contribute to
ecosystem damage through deposition of nitrogen to vegetation and soils. While
the main chemical pathways were identified in the 1970s, recent lab and field
Seabed Resource
Mapping for the 21st
Century
Exploiting numerical
weather prediction to
support the reliable
and secure
development of
renewable power
generation in the
developing world
Improving
management of
observations and analysis have demonstrated that major gaps in our understanding
remain, particularly for short-lived species such as HONO which enhance rapid
oxidation, ClNO2 and organic nitrates which permit storage and transport of
nitrogen, and agricultural ammonia and amines as aerosol precursors contributing
to urban haze. Nitrogen oxide emission from vehicle exhaust remains a major
problem in UK cities, which regularly exceed EU air quality thresholds for health,
and nitrogen deposition measurements fail to match the fall in primary reactive
nitrogen emissions, highlighting weaknesses in our understanding of primary and
secondary emissions, transformation and scavenging processes. These gaps in
knowledge need to be addressed through new lab, field and modelling studies that
build on recent NERC investments in measurement campaigns, and which will
allow improved assessment of reactive nitrogen impacts on human health and
ecosystems.
At least half the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) is not yet covered by highresolution seabed surveys and, hence, the UK is lagging behind several countries in
the quality of seabed information. This lack of data threatens our environment and
limits the development of our natural resources. In recent years, the focus for
offshore surveys has turned to the use of multibeam echo-sounder (MBES) data,
supplemented by sampling and seismic profiling where possible. The MBES data
provide images of the seafloor that not only allow geologists and other marine
scientists to construct new high resolution interpretations of the seafloor, but also
allow the data collected in previous programmes to be re-interpreted, in places
where the MBES data have provided greater detail of the seafloor environment.
This step-change in resolution was driven by new technology, but also by new
competing uses of the marine environment. In the 1970s, the prime purpose of the
new surveys was focused on the growing oil and gas industry; but, since then,
there have been dramatic increases in offshore industry, including aggregate
extraction and the construction of some of the largest offshore wind farms in the
world. Environmental issues, associated with coastal erosion, fishing, habitat
preservation and the reaction of the seas to climate change, have resulted in EUled regulations which require much higher resolution data than that provided by
the early maps. Westminster and the devolved governments have reacted to these
challenges by developing marine spatial planning. However, the real advances have
been from the collection and interpretation of new MBES data. Building on the
recent advances and network established by the NERC-funded National Capability
Marine Environmental Mapping Program (MAREMAP), we seek to widen the data
collection and sharing by focussing the UK seabed mapping community in the
identification of seabed resources beneficial to the UK economy.
Earth’s climate warming is widely expected to have damaging impacts for food,
energy and water security. The de-carbonisation of power generation is a major
part of both climate mitigation strategy and the wider goal of moving away from
unsustainable fossil-based energy and its associated geopolitical insecurities.
Energy meteorology is an essential part of this endeavour and has seen the
development of new research bridging the gap between energy and meteorology,
affecting both demand for power (e.g. heating/cooling) and supply of renewable
resources (wind/solar/hydro-electric generation). Energy meteorology is
expanding in Europe and North America, but is poorly exploited elsewhere.
Developing economies in the tropics are, however, expected to be the main
sources of growth for energy (from industrial and population growth) and
projected increases in power demand growth in Asia far outstrip those of the
West. To supply this power sustainably and in-line with carbon commitments,
development of effective and intelligent renewable resources is needed. Applying
established methodologies of energy meteorology to tropical variability, such as
the monsoons, and in Africa, will allow better utilization of renewable energy
resources and ensure that energy systems are designed to be resilient to the
variations in power output caused by weather and climate variability.
Lightning presents a potent weather hazard to people or systems, with many
injuries and several deaths occurring annually in the UK from lightning. The
atmospheric
electricity hazards
CCS and saline pore
fluid production and
displacement
Emerging hazards in
near shore
ecosystems (and food
products) as a result
of multiple stressors.
Negative Carbon
Emissions – Feasibility
and Impacts
modern reliance on widespread electronic infrastructure brings with it vulnerability
to lightning-induced transients. Physical protection is a long-standing mitigation
methodology, for example as used on aircraft. This has been informed by past
statistics on lightning, but these may no longer be reliable under climate change,
which is expected to increase convective activity in some regions. Critically,
existing lightning detection systems only respond to an actual lightning event,
which may itself be the cause of a system failure or even a fatality, therefore
providing zero warning to the region affected. For a lightning discharge to occur, a
cloud must, firstly, have become strongly electrified and, secondly, a propagating
leader be initiated or triggered by an external energetic event. Effective recognition
of electrically developing clouds may therefore provide advanced warning of
situations in which lightning may occur, providing more opportunity for evasive or
mitigation procedures before the first strike. The idea here is to focus UK
research in atmospheric electricity to develop capability for identifying highly
electrified pre-lightning clouds, to improve warning times for lightning forecasts.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a key component of the UK’s carbon dioxide
(CO2) emissions reduction strategy. One of the most promising CO2 geological
storage options for the UK is the potential to store CO2 in deep saline aquifer
formations offshore in UK waters. CO2 Stored (www.co2stored.co.uk) estimates
a national storage capacity in such aquifers of up to 60 Gt of CO2 (compared with
annual total emissions of approximately 0.5 Gt).
Injection of CO2 into subsurface aquifers causes pressure rise and displacement of
native pore fluids which sometimes have salinities and chemistries that are not
conducive to ecosystem health. The key unknown is whether this displaced pore
fluid, either via seepage to the seabed or manual extraction (production) and
subsequent disposal has a significant environmental impact risk that would
undermine storage capacity, increase costs or impact public acceptance of CCS.
Modelling suggests that between 23 and 100 % equivalent volume of pore fluid to
CO2 injected could be produced to maximise storage capacity and minimise
pressure inference in target areas. We therefore propose a highlight topic that
would quantify extraction rates, dispersion processes, impact and management
strategies for extracted brines with a view to de-risking future CCS operations.
This topic addresses two of NERC’s societal challenges ‘Managing environmental
change’ and ‘Resilience to environmental hazards’. The UK shellfish industry is
worth over £250 million annually and is an important contributor to the UK
economy. Climate and oceanographic changes will not only lead to oceans
warming steadily but also affect the frequency, intensity and duration of extreme
weather events (e.g. heavy rainfall and longer and warmer summers). Vibrio
parahaemolyticus is a human pathogen and globally the leading cause of seafoodassociated gastroenteritis. The presence of V. parahaemolyticus in the environment
is dependent on temperature and salinity. Fluctuations to temperature and salinity
as a result of climate change will lead to conditions favorable for the growth of V.
parahaemolyticus increasing the exposure of this pathogen to the shellfish
consumers. A recent report in Science indicates that pathogenic Vibrio species
pose one of the greatest risks to public health in the European Union in the
coming years due to the strength of the disease link to climate change [1]. In the
last 15 years, rising sea temperatures has led to an increase in V. parahaemolyticus
outbreaks worldwide and for the rise in cases seen in Europe. Data from North
east USA and the Baltic Sea, suggests that temperate regions are particularly
vulnerable to the emergence of pathogens, demonstrating clear correlations
between episodes of unusually high water temperature and outbreaks of
pathogenic Vibrio infections [2, 3]. The aim of this highlight topic is to address
whether V. parahaemolyticus can act as an indicator of climate change as well to
help ascertain and manage the risk they may pose to human health.
The goal of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) is to avoid ‘dangerous’ climate change, defined as more than 2oC of
warming. The latest climate science indicates that this will now almost certainly
require negative global CO2 emissions (Fuss et al. 2014). There have been a
Expanding the
molecular toolbox to
address global
environmental change
Understanding Marine
Metapopulation
Structures in a
changing environment
Polar Opposites:
Contrasting Sea Ice
Changes in a
number of potential Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) techniques or Negative
Emissions Technologies (NETs) proposed (see Research Questions), but these are
currently under-developed and have poorly quantified side-effects. For example,
most scenarios considered in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
report (IPCC AR5) that achieve the UNFCCC target assume negative CO2
emissions (Gasser et al., 2015; Anderson, 2015), primarily through large-scale
implementation of BECCS (Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage).
The feasibility of such expansion of BECCS is however highly uncertain, in view of
its land and water requirements, that conflict with increasing demand for food and
freshwater, and also have potentially adverse environmental impacts, both on
biodiversity and unintentional climatic effects. There is an urgent need to establish
what level and mix of NETs is societally and environmentally acceptable, and to
assess the feasibility and impacts of alternative ways of achieving the removal of
greenhouse gases from the atmosphere – thereby providing scientific guidance, at
the national and international level, in this crucial policy area.
As a result of environmental change on microbial activity, ‘dead zones’ are
expanding, greenhouse gas cycles are evolving and harmful algal blooms are
increasing in frequency worldwide, with concomitant threats to ocean productivity,
oceanic carbon sequestration, and derived industries (e.g. tourism, fisheries and
aquaculture) but the enormity of space, time and diversity scales hinders adequate
measurement and parameterisation of the problems and identification of novel
solutions. There is a need for sequence-based approaches beyond rRNA
phylogenetic markers in molecular ecology because function cannot be predicted
by phylogeny (e.g. the transfer of key genes between species has resulted in the
proliferation of antibiotic resistance and pathogenicity). Three major advances have
emerged independently in recent years: 1) the widespread application of
environmental ‘omics,’ 2) bioinformatics innovations to analyse interacting systems
and 3) the miniaturisation of autonomous devices. With innovative advances in
Systems Biology, molecular ecology has the potential to move from a descriptive
field, yielding potential networks based on coincident timing of expression of key
genes, to one which can test hypotheses, deliver quantitative fluxes and predict
outcomes such as toxicity and trophic effects based on the entire ecosystem,
through space and time. Transformative science, merging deployable sensors with
novel omics techniques will reveal drivers of population distributions and activities
by integrating microbial function into its environmental context, leading to
promising environmental diagnostics.
We know that anthropogenic forces including climate change are the main causes
of habitat destruction, fragmentation and biodiversity loss in terrestrial habitats. It
has long been suspected that these spatially explicit forces are also having profound
effects on the population dynamics of most species in marine ecosystems,
However, we do not understand the spatial dynamics of marine populations well
enough to move forward with confidence and at lower risk in the spatial
management of new activities such as regional fisheries, Marine Protected Areas
(MPAs) and large scale renewable developments. For most species in UK waters,
including financially important commercial fish, benthic species and charismatic
species (seabirds and marine mammals), it is not even known whether UK waters
host a single population or multiple interconnected populations. Classical
metapopulation theory explicitly focuses attention on the specifics of patches of
habitat types and requires defined reasons for patchiness and mechanisms of
connectivity between populations. Quantifying metapopulation structures of
multiple species across trophic levels, including spatio-temporal heterogeneity in
demography and linking the physical, temporal and genetic connectivity of
populations will allow us to effectively manage our oceans for both increasing
intensity of anthropogenic uses and sustainable levels of productivity and
biodiversity.
Arctic sea ice is declining rapidly, but Antarctic sea ice is slowly expanding.
Scientists cannot explain this discrepancy, and climate models do not reproduce it.
This provides a high-profile example from which climate science may be (quite
Warming World
Attributing Persistent
and Damaging Events
A case study of
expanding of hypoxia
in the oceans: The
Bay of Bengal and its
biogeochemistry
A “whole earth and
human systems”
validly) attacked (‘Global warming computer models confounded as Antarctic sea
ice hits new record high…’ Daily Mail 5/7/14). The Arctic ice decline is widely held
to be the result of human activities, but if it is the result of ‘global’ warming or of
‘polar amplification’ of warming then this should also be true in the Antarctic.
The climate models in IPCC assessments produce a similar ice decline at both
poles. This decline is slower than the observed Arctic ice loss, and in direct
contradiction to the Antarctic increase. Since sea ice is linked to all aspects of
polar climate, these poor results impact our ability to project future changes in
Arctic exploitation, northern hemisphere weather, global ocean circulation,
oceanic carbon drawdown, and sea-level rise from Greenland and Antarctica.
A coordinated UK programme with expertise at both poles is required to
reconcile the contrasting trends observed under ‘global’ warming and improve
their representation in climate models.
This idea aims to establish the science base for quantification of the human
influence on high-impact weather events such as the UK flooding of winter 2014
and the European heat wave of 2015. Such events are uncommon (typically less
than once a decade in any particular location) driven by persistent circulation
anomalies, often on a seasonal scale that may be enhanced or influenced by
regional forcings or feedbacks such as land surface drying or atmosphere-ocean
interactions. Examples are the storm track lying over southern England in the UK
winter rainfall event 2014 and the role of long-lived blocking events in recent heat
waves and cold spells. This type of event has caused enormous damage to both
capital assets and human well being and there is intense public, political and media
interest in the role that human drivers have had in such events.
This Highlight Topic will aim to understand how much climate change is changing
the likelihood of such events, quantify local feedbacks that strengthen such events,
and determine if climate change is affecting the persistence of relevant atmospheric
circulation or strengthening feedbacks, such as through increased evaporation and
drought. Fundamentally, these are probabilistic questions and so a secondary focus
of this project will be approaches to do this. Only a quantitative approach that
considers both local and remote effects and critically evaluates models ability to
simulate circulation changes can reliably attribute cause to the changing probability
of extreme events.
Advanced oxygen depletion (hypoxia) in the oceans impacts heavily on watercolumn and seafloor ecosystems and biogeochemical cycling. Models consistently
project future expansion of hypoxia, and increasing occurrence of well-publicised
“dead zones”1 highlights that it may already underway. Within this context, the
Bay of Bengal (BoB) is exceptionally significant. Like its neighbour the Arabian Sea
(AS), it has a basin-wide, mid-water (~200-1000m) oxygen minimum zone (OMZ),
together forming an important fraction of Earth’s hypoxic waters and overlaying
~60% of the Earth’s margin sediments currently exposed to hypoxia2. However,
unlike the AS, the BoB’s OMZ is poised just short of extreme hypoxia3. Reasons
remain uncertain, but there is consensus that the bay is extremely prone to future
intensification and expansion of hypoxia4. The potential consequences - ecological,
biogeochemical and socio-economic - are immense. A unique feature of the bay is
the massive influence of the Ganges-Brahmaputra river system, which effectively
turns it into an “open ocean estuary”. It has been hypothesised that riverine
sediment discharge controls mid-water hypoxia by serving as “ballast” that limits
organic matter decay and more rapidly transfers it to the sea floor3. A multidisciplinary research programme is needed to test this hypothesis, as part of a
wider assessment of current water-column and seafloor ecosystem function and
their susceptibility to future mid-water and coastal hypoxia. It would require novel
in situ studies carried out across continental margins (shelf to open ocean), to
involve an unprecedented combination of experimental, geochemical, biological and
modelling approaches.
To explore the challenge and understand the current science, data, uncertainty
modelling and scalability limitations required, to undertake a “whole earth
approach to urbanised
catchment simulators
Role of atmospheric
ionization in weather
and climate
Melting of the
Greenland ice sheet in
response to oceanic
and atmospheric
forcing
Improving process
understanding of
vegetation fire for
prediction of societal
risk and climate
change
systems” modelling approach down to catchment, city and dwelling scale. To
develop a co-operative simulation environment for research-based models that
could integrate natural, built environment and human behaviour data, potential
interactions and uncertainties and their impact on urban ecosystems,
infrastructure, service delivery (water, energy, transport, waste and pollution
control) and human wellbeing. To include time scales and cohorts of “gaming”
scenarios, from extreme events interrupting daily, essential urban service, life
cycles to multi-decadal planning for resilient adaptions to change. Some model and
simulator components may exist (geology, flooding, pipe networks, air pollution)
but not an integrated and interactive, city-scale system able to address the
uncertainties and range of timescales required. The simulator would have wide
spread applications to: screen and test research ideas, inform urban and catchment
planning, develop and test resilience and systems management (water, energy,
transport, ecosystems and infrastructure) in the context of climate change and
increasing urban population.
The global atmospheric electrical system depends on the slight conductivity of
atmospheric air, which originates from the cluster ions it contains. The cluster ions
are generated by constant ionization from cosmic rays and natural radioactivity,
with additional ionization occurring during space weather events. It is not widely
appreciated that cosmic rays also provide ionization in the stratosphere and
troposphere, and are the dominant source of ionization in the marine boundary
layer. As well as making the air electrically conductive, molecular cluster-ions are
the smallest constituents of the atmospheric aerosol spectrum. The presence of
atmospheric cluster ions is now considered likely to influence the earth’s radiation
balance, directly through absorption in the longwave parts of the spectrum, and
indirectly through their interactions with clouds and aerosol. In the upper
atmosphere, cluster ions create radiatively active species through chemical
processes. The radiative impact of these different processes is currently poorly
understood and certainly not yet quantified. It is amenable to investigation both
experimentally and theoretically, with the goal of allowing global modelling studies
to quantitatively evaluate the direct and indirect radiative impact of cluster ions.
Approximately 25% of the global mean sea level rise observed in recent decades
comes from melting and discharge of the Greenland ice sheet. Freshwater fluxes
from the Greenland ice sheet can also contribute to reorganisation of the Atlantic
ocean circulation, with potential impacts on regional and global climate. Recent
observations indicate a significant link between rapid ice discharge and ocean
warming. The interaction of ice and ocean presents certain commonalities with
that in Antarctica, but the Greenland ice sheet provides unique challenges. The
Greenland ice sheet discharges through hundreds of outlet glaciers, many running
out into the ocean through narrow proglacial fjords which modulate ocean
circulation and heat transport to the ice. Furthermore, climatic warming drives
significant surface melting in Greenland, which can influence ice sheet flow, and
provide freshwater fluxes via subglacial discharge that impacts fjord and ocean
circulation. The calving of icebergs also provides a significant contribution to the
mass balance. In order to make confident projections of sea level rise and ocean
freshwater fluxes, we need an understanding of how these factors fit together to
control the mass balance of the ice sheet and its contribution to sea level rise. This
highlight topic would combine observations of these disparate processes,
understand their linkages and impact on glacier mass balance in a single “closed
catchment”, and use the resulting insight to constrain and develop models for use
in future projections of Greenland melt and sea level rise.
The aim of this topic is to advance process understanding of and improve the
ability to predict vegetation fires around the globe, their role in the Earth system,
and their risks to society. Fire exerts controls on ecosystem function, species
diversity, plant community structure and carbon storage, and emits CO2, reactive
trace gases and particulate matter to the atmosphere, impacting on both regional
air quality and global climate. More than 5M people globally were affected by the
300 major fire events in the past 30 years, causing $52,300M losses (EM-DAT;
Multiple stressors in
aquatic ecosystems
Defining a framework
for deriving sea ice
extent in the presatellite era
Bio-inspired
Environmental
Sustainability:
Translating
Understanding of
Organism Adaptation
to Building Adaptive
Capacity of Ecological
Systems
http://www.emdat.be). Fire poses significant risks to society; mitigation of this risk
requires better understanding of fire processes. Projections of an increased
prevalence of drought in fire-prone regions in the coming decades, such as
Southern Europe, Western USA and Australia, place an urgent priority on
improving this understanding. An increasing trend in fire activity has already been
noted in some of these regions. Fire and climate are intimately linked: changes to
climate drive changes to fire, and in return fire alters climate through changing
surface properties, and as a source of climate active gases and particles. Climate
change may substantially increase future societal risks from fire, but fully interactive
fire- vegetation -climate-chemistry modelling is not yet mature enough to be
included in Earth System Models as used the IPCC AR5. This topic will advance
knowledge of fire processes, fire feedbacks and fire risks, in order to deliver
credible assessments of future changes in fire regimes in the near term (decades)
to long-term (century), allowing us to better anticipate their impact on
ecosystems, human health and infrastructures.
Global climate change stressors combined with more regional anthropogenic
pollution are currently driving changes at an unprecedented rate in Earth’s history,
threatening the health of marine and freshwater ecosystems. Global warming,
aquatic acidification and increasing incidence of hypoxia are occurring alongside
more regionalized stressors, including chemical pollution. This is challenging aquatic
organisms with novel combinations of multiple stressors, and increasing the risk of
local and global extinction events. There is an urgent need to move beyond single
stressor experiments to understand how these factors interact to affect aquatic
organisms and populations. A mechanistic perspective is needed on the
physiological and adaptive capacity of aquatic organisms to respond to combined
global and local environmental challenges. This knowledge will allow the
construction of evidence-based predictive models to facilitate risk- based
management focused on key priorities for the UK, EU and international agencies
(e.g. Water Framework Directive, Marine Strategy Framework Directive etc.). This
will reduce uncertainty of future projections, inform policy and drive solutions to
counter the impacts of multi-stressors on aquatic ecosystems.
Sea ice plays a major role in modulating global climate. It alters the albedo of the
Earth’s surface, and the physical and biological processes that can draw down CO2
from the atmosphere. Climate simulations predict a decline in sea ice with
increasing greenhouse gases in agreement with observations in the Arctic while
Antarctic sea ice exhibits regional decline but overall expansion. Observational
records are short (post-1979) making it hard to assess the significance of the
recent trends or understand the consequences of changing sea ice on polar (and
global) climate and marine biodiversity. Reconstructions of past sea ice extent, on
centennial to millennial timescales, are possible using proxies derived from ice core
data and could provide valuable boundary conditions for the current climate
models. However, to be used with confidence, the potential proxies, both chemical
and biological, must be properly understood and rigorously calibrated.
Changes in climate and land use generate threats from flooding, drought, pollution,
and infectious disease against which our cities, infrastructure and natural spaces
will have to adapt and become resilient. “Nature-based solutions”, which are
actions inspired by, supported by, or copied from nature, are increasingly used as a
resource-efficient means of environmental management. The “nature-based
solution” concept builds on the services provided by ecosystems, but more
generally looks to nature for knowledge of design and process. A potentially huge
source of such knowledge, which remains largely untapped, is from understanding
how organisms maintain the health of their bodies and have adapted to particular
environmental challenges – an approach called biomimicry. To open up this source
of innovative environmental management, there is a need for research that first
recognizes those organismal adaptations (morphological or functional) that have
potential for translation to a nature-based solution (which may involve engineering
landscape morphology, managing flows and ecosystem feedbacks); this will involve
a thorough understanding of both physiological mechanism and ecosystem
Redrawing the coast:
an interdisciplinary
programme combining
marine, freshwater
and terrestrial science
at the land/sea
boundary
Interactions between
aquatic and terrestrial
biomes: biotic and
abiotic responses
Hydrological
constraints to lowland
peat restoration
function. Second, the research should both propose and test alternative
approaches to scaling up to provide cost-effective environmental intervention.
This will allow us establish guidelines that will enable successful translation of this
knowledge to make effective management interventions, at usually larger spatial
and temporal scales, in environments prone to particular risks.
Coastal habitats are some of our most naturally dynamic ecosystems and are
important places for people and wildlife. Major re-shaping of coastline that protect
people and infrastructure is now underway due to unsustainable costs of
maintaining coastal defences and modification due to ongoing global environmental
change. Other pressures forcing coastal change include exploitation of coasts to
deliver low-carbon energy (e.g. £1 billion potential investment in a Swansea Bay
tidal lagoon). These developments are already in progress yet the near and far-field
effects of these multiple pressures on the structure and function of coastal
ecosystems are not well understood. Potentially, this has major economic impacts
as the total economic value of the ecosystem services provided by the UK’s coast
are estimated at £48 billion (UK NEA). Currently past research on the dynamics of
coastal margins, shorelines and offshore systems has either focussed on single
issues (e.g. sediment transport or ecosystem service provisioning) or has been site
specific limiting our capability to effectively respond to these challenges. There is
therefore potential for significant scientific advancement, underpinned by an urgent
strategic need, to quantify multi-directional exchanges and interdependencies
among terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems, underpinning sustainability.
This highlight topic proposes to initiate new ways of working across the science
communities, developing common understanding of the challenges posed by
managing environmental change at the land/sea interface.
Britain is a land mass surrounded on all sides by costal marine ecosystems and
internally supports ~400,000 km of freshwater streams and rivers which connect
the landmasses in a complex moving lattice. A considerable emphasis has been
placed on research devoted to understanding these systems in isolation however
the aquatic biome cannot and should not truly be considered as separated from
the terrestrial biome. Terrestrial and aquatic systems interact continually from
ocean currents interacting with climate to agricultural runoff modifying the
freshwater ecosystems. These have direct (e.g. movement of species in and out of
systems such as the emergence of aquatic insects) and indirect (changing nutrient
availability) impacts on productivity and biodiversity of both biomes with specific
measurable abiotic and biotic effects. The net result challenges our stewardship of
natural resources with significant societal and economic impacts to the UK and our
commitments to international resource standards (e.g. Water Framework and
Habitat Directives).
The purpose of this proposal is to promote high quality research which considers
the impact of links between these biomes. These links should be biotic (e.g. species
interactions such as predation) and abiotic (e.g. biogeochemical cycling) in nature
and must be considered across at least two systems. In particular this call focuses
on three components:
1. Measuring ways in which aquatic and terrestrial systems interact on a landscape
scale
2. Experimental manipulation of these interactions to measure their stability and
resilience to modification of either biome
3. Understanding whether one biome may have a buffering effect promoting
resilience to modification in the other.
Lowland peat in the UK was historically drained for agriculture and low water
tables continue to be maintained to support agricultural production. However,
drained peat is subject to oxidation and the Adaptation Sub-Committee have
identified these soils as being particularly vulnerable to loss; there is a risk that the
peat topsoil layer in the Fens could be lost in the next 30 to 60 years due to
management and climate change. Apart from their value as productive soils,
lowland peatlands are also significant carbon stores and their restoration will
reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Any plans for restoration needs to be balanced with the potential loss of high
grade agricultural land and be guided by the potential to restore individual sites.
However, it cannot be assumed that all lowland peatlands are restorable as the
hydrological systems that formed them have been significantly modified by man. In
some areas settlements have been built which rely on the continued drainage
(through pumping) of the peat. Therefore, there may be other societal constraints
to restoration related to regional hydrology.
Maintaining
productive use of
lowland peat whilst
reducing the loss of
carbon and
greenhouse gas
emissions
Restoration of
significantly eroded
upland peat to fully
functional blanket bog
Understanding the
“invisible” parts of the
water cycle: Bridging
spatial, temporal and
conceptual scales to
enable sustainable
management of water
resources
A methodology is required to identify which sites are restorable, i.e. where there
are no hydrological constraints to lowland peat restoration, and be applied to the
lowland peatlands of the UK to guide decisions on restoration.
Lowland peatlands in the UK are some of our most productive soils and are used
to grow high economic value crops, i.e. field vegetables. However, the Adaptation
Sub-Committee has identified these soils as being particularly vulnerable to loss.
For example, there is a risk that the peat topsoil layer in the Fens could be lost in
the next 30 to 60 years due to management and climate change. These sites are
the source of significant greenhouse gas emissions.
Balancing the environmental benefits of restored peatland with its economic
potential is difficult. Full restoration of these sites would take land out of
agricultural production. However, there may be management strategies, e.g.
through seasonal changes to the water table, which could allow ‘dry’ agricultural
production to continue, both prolonging the productive lifetime of these soils and
reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Where sites are re-wetted paludiculture or
‘wet’ agriculture may be practiced. However, there are few UK examples of
paludiculture in practice.
Successful management strategies to maintain ‘dry’ agriculture on lowland peat
soils need to be identified and the potential for ‘wet’ agriculture explored. The
economics of each practice and the benefits for greenhouse gas emissions and
other ecosystem services need to be estimated.
Peatland comprises a significant proportion of the total UK soil carbon pool and its
management is of great concern due to its vulnerability to changing climates,
relationship with greenhouse gas emissions and provision of numerous additional
ecosystem services. Blanket bog is a priority habitat under the Habitats Directive
and is globally rare. Britain has about 10-15% of the total global area of blanket
bog.
The strategy to date for restoring heavily eroding upland peat has been to stabilize
the eroding peat surface and introduce typical bog vegetation. However, without
further action this will not necessarily result in a fully functional blanket bog
ecosystem. This will normally require some action to restore the hydrology of the
site and raise the water table. In a heavily ‘hagged’ and eroded peat this is likely to
be particularly challenging due to the topographic variability across the site. If
society is to benefit from the full range of ecosystem services of blanket bogs a
more sophisticated restoration plan for these sites needs to be developed.
Holistic understanding of water resources is needed to manage effects of natural
and anthropogenic environmental changes, yet to achieve this there is a disconnect
between surface hydrology and subsurface hydrogeology that requires bridging. To
address the basic challenge of sustainable management of water resources, recent
and ongoing NERC strategic programs have boosted research on managing the
‘visible’ part of the water-cycle, i.e. land surface, immediate subsurface and
atmosphere (Changing Water Cycle 2009-2015; UK Droughts & Water Scarcity
2013-2018; Using Critical Zone Science to Understand Sustaining the Ecosystem
Service of Soil & Water (CZO) 2015-2018; Dynamics of freshwater ecosystems
within an integrated landscape system). To better understand and predict how our
Autonomous
Observation of the
carbonate system and
Air-Sea CO2 flux
Flood risk resilience
from soil management
Forecasting debriscovered glacier
recession due to
climatic change
planet works, however, requires water management tools with much better
integration of the ‘invisible’ parts of the water-cycle, i.e. shallow to deep subsurface
water systems: achieving this outcome is the aim of this highlight topic.
Observing the oceanic uptake of atmospheric CO2 is of critical importance to
understanding historic, present and future climate change, with the oceans
historically having absorbed ~48% of our fossil fuel emissions . The UK and NERC
community plays a leading role in the measurement of CO2 in the surface waters
of the world’s oceans not least through the international SOCAT initiative and
ICOS. This data together with wind and wave and other data (e.g. from ships and
satellites), has enabled estimate of the flux (or rate of exchange) of CO2 from the
atmosphere into the global oceans. To date, the majority of the data have come
from scientific instrumentation carried on the world’s merchant vessel fleet.
However, there are significant gaps in the data, including in the Southern ocean,
Arctic, Indian Ocean, Malayan Archipelago, South Atlantic and South Pacific where
suitable shipping routes are sparse and conditions are challenging for manned
systems. This initiative will develop technology and conduct demonstration
deployments that measure the carbonate system (including dissolved CO2) using
robust instrumentation and autonomous vehicles. Such vehicles could fill the gaps
in spatial coverage, and also gather extensive time-series of data which would
hugely improve our understanding of the process of air-sea CO2 transfer. We will
combine existing capability in state of the art robotic vehicles instrumentation
operation and research to create a measurement capability that can be directed to
autonomously map the carbonate system in regions of sparse or non-existent data,
or to important isolated or episodic events such as storms associated with high
air-sea fluxes but which are currently poorly measured and therefore understood
or parameterized in models. This will augment our understanding of air-sea CO2
flux and will provide fresh insights into the associated acidification of our oceans.
Weather, seasons, land management and ecology can all induce changes to the
terrestrial environment over short-time frames. Very broad questions remain,
however, on the extent and causes of these changes, so their incorporation into
predictive models of terrestrial processes is weak. A significant recent example is
the potential for farming practices that destabilize or compact soils to lead to
winter flooding. Hydrological models do not adequately account for changes in
soil water transport properties over time after extreme weather, between seasons
or resulting from tillage, often do not take into account connectivity to
groundwater, and only limited research has explored the potential for ecology to
restore the hydrological functioning of soils.
This idea focuses on better describing the linkage between climatic change and the
dynamic response of debris-covered glaciers. Fundamentally, the scientific
community lacks primary data relating to long-term (decadal) mass balance, diurnal
to seasonal ablation rates (and their drivers) beneath variable debris
thicknesses/lithologies, ice and debris thermal properties and ice thicknesses. A
strategic opportunity therefore exists to install sensor networks at glaciologically
important sites, e.g. in mountain ranges such as the Himalayas and the Andes,
primarily to improve forecasts of water availability and glacier disappearance.
Primary data relating to the drivers of mass gain and loss in debris-covered glacial
environments are difficult to acquire across wide areas given extreme topography
and, in places, political access restrictions. Most recent research has therefore
relied on poorly-parameterised and poorly-validated model outputs. Several papers
have made regional-scale predictions about the impact of changing ice volumes on
river flows, but without the ability to consider how the mass balance of individual
glaciers or even across a catchment may change, or to be able to explicitly
partition the contributions of glacier melt vs precipitation vs groundwater to basin
hydrology. Decision-makers in regions dependent on glacier melt for irrigation and
sanitation therefore base adaptation and resilience strategies on best-guess
estimates.
Two other major issues are closely associated with this environmental challenge.
The first relates to our knowledge of glacial lakes and outburst flooding; questions
How will restored
habitat patches
contribute to
functioning ecological
networks?
Understanding
complex fluid flow
pathways in low
permeability
geological media
remain about the drivers of supraglacial pond expansion, mechanisms of dam
failure, and modelling of flood extents/timings. The second relates to our
knowledge of previous glacial activity; timings of glacial maxima, previous ice
volumes and rates of recession over centennial-millennial timescales. By deriving
better quality and more spatially comprehensive data relating to the drivers of
mass gain and loss on debris-covered glaciers the scientific community will have
the necessary tools to advance knowledge in all three of these areas (water
resources, glacial lakes, palaeo-environments) yielding tangible and measurable
social benefits.
Some key land-use policies (see below) are predicated on the idea that ecosystem
function can be maintained in heavily human-modified landscapes as long as there is
a certain minimum amount of "green infrastructure" to form a "functioning
ecological network". However, the existing science base does not tell us what
amount and configuration of habitat features would actually deliver a functioning
network.
We propose the first concerted program of experimental habitat network creation
anywhere in the world, to address these major knowledge gaps. Habitat patches
would be created experimentally in different contexts in fragmented landscapes, in
order to test how they lead to the recovery of lost population sustainability and
resilience at a whole-network scale. Populations of representative species, with a
variety of traits and ecosystem roles, would be monitored both before and after
the intervention, both in the restored patches and in the pre-existing habitat.
Dispersal between patches would also be monitored for selected species using
tracking technology and genetic methods. The experimental design would test the
effects of patch size and connectivity, while cutting across the effects of landscape
history and species pool (e.g. with replicate blocks in widely differing landscapes).
The experiment would increase in value over time, but could also produce
important, policy-relevant results within 5-6 years.
Knowledge of the fluid flow properties of low permeability rocks and sediments is
vital in a range of areas such as predicting the long-term performance of
radioactive waste disposal and CO2 storage sites; understanding flow in
unconventional petroleum reservoirs; modelling the injection of waste products,
such as produced during oil field decommissioning; and understanding the
movement of sediment and magma in the subsurface. However, fluid flow
mechanisms and pathways in such materials are poorly understood and
controversial. For example, the petroleum industry and the radwaste disposal
community have opposed views on two-phase flow through shale. The former
views flow as occurring either along brittle fractures or via capillary leakage
whereas, the latter argues that high fluid pressures deform the rock to create new
flow conduits (i.e. pathway dilation). Here we propose funding research in this vital
area with particular focus on quantitative understanding of pathway dilation on a
range of scales from grain-scale microfractures to large seismogenic faults and the
enigmatic vertical fluid flow ‘chimneys’ seen in unconsolidated sediments. UK
research is conducting laboratory measurements of fluid flow through low
permeability sediments (e.g. BGS) and EU funded projects on the nature of fluid
flow chimneys (e.g. University of Oxford). It is also developing both passive and
active seismic tools to monitor the development of flow conduits (e.g. University
of Bristol, Imperial College). A specific call on this subject would allow UK groups
from many disciplines to work together to provide a step-change in our
understanding of, and ability to model, fluid flow in these important rocks.
Ideas submitted as potential strategic programme areas
Title
Volcanic Geohazards:
Getting the full
picture from the
Summary
Explosive volcanism poses a moderate-frequency but high-impact hazard worldwide. While the terrestrial record is poorly preserved, the marine record is far
more complete and provides a more comprehensive window into the frequency,
marine record
Biogeochemistry,
physics and ecology of
the Indian Ocean – a
Multi-disciplinary,
Multi-year Expedition
(BIOMME)
Macrophysiology in
the Anthropocene
and the future of
ecosystem resources
magnitude, impact and processes leading to and resulting from explosive eruptions.
Furthermore there are over 25,000 submarine volcanoes, which are as equally
hazardous as terrestrial volcanoes. Unlike their terrestrial counterparts,
technologies to monitor some of the most threatening submarine volcanoes
remain primitive and require novel development. By identifying key locations, we
will assess past and present explosive volcanoes and their hazards. Data from the
geological record and medium-term monitoring, using new and novel technologies,
will be combined with regional information in statistical models to assess the
current and future threat posed by explosive volcanoes, especially those impacting
on UK interests.
The southern Indian Ocean (from approximately 10˚ to 40˚S) is a highly dynamic
region, in terms of physics, biogeochemistry and ecosystems. It provides a major
link in the global ocean circulation, via the Agulhas Current, to the Atlantic Ocean.
Despite this it is one of the least studied, understood and characterised regions of
the world’s ocean. The aim is to carry out a multi-disciplinary, multi-year study
encompassing physics, biogeochemistry and ecology of this poorly understood
region of the world’s ocean. This would lead to advances in modelling of the
region and in our understanding of its role in the global climate system, thus
improving projections of future change. The research would contribute to the 2nd
International Indian Ocean Expedition (IIOE-2; 2016-2020).
The era of human industrialisation, the Anthropocene, is an age of unprecedented
change for species living on planet earth. A combination of habit loss, over
harvesting and rapid environmental change is markedly affecting where species can
and cannot live. Humans rely on the predictable supply of plants and animals to
provide essential “ecosystem services” such as habitat, food and well-being. In
particular food security is high on every nation’s political agenda. Whilst
understanding patterns of Biodiversity has pre-occupied humans throughout
scientific history, there has arguably never been a greater need to understand the
factors that will determine species distributions into the future.
Multiple physical and biological factors interact to determine species resilience to
variability and change in their environment. Comparative studies of individuals,
populations and species, across environmental and biological gradients, can help us
understand how environmental variation has driven the evolution of species
capacities – their physiological tolerance. Recently, there has been a strong
scientific focus towards the search for “macrophysiological rules” that describe
species capacities across spatial gradients. The ability to improve predictions of
future patterns of biodiversity requires new approaches and enhanced integration
across disciplines. The UK has strength in depth in these disciplines that, if
integrated, will place the UK at the forefront of this global field.
Deep Frontiers:
Deep-sea mining is predicted to be worth up to £40 billion to the UK economy,
fundamental ecological from exploitation of the mineral resources on the ocean floor and global
research for the UK's opportunities for the UK's subsea technology and environmental consultancy
future in deep-ocean
sectors. But the development of this industry is currently hampered by a limited
mining
understanding of the ecological dynamics of deep-sea environments, essential for
responsible management of their resources and to reduce risk of liability for
operators. We therefore propose a Strategic Programme to revolutionise our
understanding of the biodiversity and resilience of marine ecosystems relevant to
deep-sea mining, thereby advancing fundamental ecological knowledge of our
planet's largest biome and delivering the NERC goal of "managing our environment
responsibly as we pursue new ways of living, doing business, and growing
economies". The UK research community is well-placed to lead the world in this
field, through a track record of recent deep-sea discoveries, NERC investments in
cutting-edge facilities for marine research and novel analytical techniques for life
sciences, and a diversity of relevant deep-sea habitats available for study in UK
overseas territory EEZ and seafloor claim areas.
The Southern Ocean’s The Southern Ocean is the site where much of the interior ocean ventilates to the
Role in the Earth
atmosphere, and much of the interior water masses are formed. As a result, it
System.
WAIS-deep
The Indian Ocean and
UK science: The 2nd
International Indian
Ocean Expedition 2
(IIOE2)
exerts enormous influence over the whole Earth System, with profound socioeconomic consequences on the lives and livelihoods of its inhabitants.
(a) It is critical to the global carbon budget, central to understanding past natural
atmospheric CO2 variations, and taking up much of the anthropogenic carbon
absorbed by the ocean.
(b) It is where a large proportion of the excess heat associated with global
warming is being stored.
(c) The up- and downwelling of nutrients in the Southern Ocean is a key process
that drives biological productivity over much of the globe.
(d) The Southern Ocean upwelling is the major influence on the stability of the
Antarctic ice sheet, with profound consequences for the rate of future global sea
level rise.
(e) It is the region most sensitive to the onset of ocean acidification, with
widespread impacts on biodiversity and the biological influence on climate.
However, the Southern Ocean is also the biggest data desert on the planet,
especially in winter. This has severely hampered progress in understanding its role
in these processes. Our current climate and earth system models disagree (with
each other, and with the measurements such as they are) on almost all the
important issues concerning Southern Ocean heat and carbon uptake, contribution
to sea level rise, mechanisms and formation rates for deep water, and causes of
past natural change. Similarly, they disagree on how the region will respond in the
future under climate change.
To address these issues we propose a major, multi- and cross-disciplinary
programme of observations, theory and modelling, reaching across physical,
biogeochemical, paleoceanographic and cryospheric disciplines, using ships and
autonomous vehicles, remote sensing and earth system models, and involving many
institutions in the UK and partnerships abroad.
Since the 1990s, satellites have shown accelerating ice-loss driven by ocean change
in five neighbouring glacier basins that drain more than one-third of West
Antarctica. The rate of ice-loss here doubled in just six years and now accounts
for ~10% of global sea-level rise. However, considerable uncertainty remains in
projections of future ice-loss from West Antarctica, and in particular, from
Thwaites Glacier (TG), which has the highest potential of all for rapid collapse. A
major multi-disciplinary research programme focused on TG would substantially
improve both decadal and long-term (multi-century) projections of ice-loss and
sea-level rise, and support improved management of UK coastal risk. Decadal
projections would be delivered by incorporating key observations from the crucial
zone where TG comes into contact with the ocean, into state-of-the-art, coupled
ice-sheet and oceanographic models. The long-term would be addressed by
answering the critical question, did Thwaites Glacier survive the last interglacial?
This period is the prime geological analogue for future greenhouse warming: global
and Antarctic temperatures were higher than present, and Antarctica contributed
to sea-levels 6-9 m higher than present. Observational evidence obtained from
sub-glacial beds, would constrain the extent and timing of past deglaciation of TG,
and provide the first opportunity to test hypotheses regarding the instability of
marine ice sheets and the irreversibility of current changes.
The UK has made significant contributions to Indian Ocean (IO) science, including
the 1st International Indian Ocean Expedition, 50 years ago. However, the region
remains amongst the least understood marine ecosystems. Here, a cross-section of
the UK marine science community propose coordinated, multidisciplinary research
in the IO region. It will form a key contribution to the 2nd International Indian
Ocean Expedition1, sponsored by the Scientific Committee on Ocean Research
(SCOR) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), to be
launched in December 2015. The IO is universally recognised as home to unique
biological, physical, geological and biogeochemical phenomena and complex landocean-atmosphere interactions. These have far-reaching impacts on ecosystems,
biogeochemical cycles and climate, but are also sensitive to environmental change
and human influences, while having impacts on the ~1/3 of the human population
A National
Experimental Platform
for Long-Term
Ecological Research
Shaping a green and
blue future for cities
The Southern Ocean
– Atmosphere System
and Global Climate
Evaluating and
managing risk
associated with UK
unconventional gas
extraction
that lives in IO rim countries. Many of these phenomena, and how they may
respond to environmental change, remain poorly understood. The IIOE2 is a
unique opportunity to build on recent UK studies in the IO. Research would
include atmospheric and land-based studies and use of remote sensing and
modelling approaches, as well as ocean-going research in marine physics, geology
and geophysics, biology and biogeochemistry. There is an outstanding opportunity
for beneficial collaboration with other contributing nations, to include joint
operations of research vessels.
We propose a national platform for long-term experimental research to address
the unmet needs of climate change research. In a world where all environments
are being subjected to change, we need to know, understand and be ready for
what lies ahead. A changing climate is affecting ecosystem services such as carbon
sequestration, it will alter soils and hydrology, increase species extinctions and
facilitate invasions. Although some effects are already evident, others will be
cumulative over long periods of time. Interactions with pollution, land management
and community composition have the potential to create feedbacks that will
complicate responses to climate change. Long-term experiments (LTEs) are
essential to understand cumulative changes we see in the landscape. They can help
us reach a deeper level of understanding than can be obtained by ecological
monitoring alone. They allow us to attribute change to specific causes and identify
mechanisms; we can also manipulate conditions beyond currently prevailing limits
and test the resistance of ecosystems to change and measure resilience to extreme
events. Long-term experiments can capture rare events, detect cumulative
ecological effects and reveal tipping-points when things change dramatically and
often unexpectedly. They can also supply accurate parameter values for use in
predictive models of biodiversity and ecosystem change under climate change.
Green and blue spaces in cities – parks, gardens, canals and waterways – are not
only core to our human health and well-being and to the urban environment, they
can also have a positive impact on our social fabric and on local economies.
Despite these known benefits, the largest missing piece of the conceptual puzzle is
an understanding the scale at which green and blue spaces must be created, where
and in what form, in order to deliver their potential services to cities and the
ecosystems within which they sit. As global populations become increasingly
urbanized, the associated environmental stresses within and around cities will
increase. These effects are likely to be exacerbated by the effects of climate change
and extreme natural events. A holistic approach that combines the natural and
engineered aspects of the urban environment with how people live in cities
and their health and wellbeing is needed to ensure the future with humans living in
harmony with the planet. Green and blue spaces are key to that approach.
The Southern Ocean is a critical modulator of global heat and carbon dioxide
within the Earth System. However, the fundamental processes thate control the
exchange of heat and carbon dioxide between the Southern Ocean and the Global
atmosphereenable this role are neither adequately understood nor quantified.
Global models, which form the basis for future climate projections and mitigation
strategies, are unable to properly represent these processes. The consequent
uncertainties in model results limits our confidence in future climate assessments.
These uncertainties, however can be reduced or even eliminated through a
carefully-targeted programme of field measurements combined with modelling
studies. The idea presented here is for such a programme. It will focus on the
Southern Ocean and the surrounding sea ice zone, will be multi-disciplinary, will
utilise some of the UKs major scientific assets and strengths, and will capitalise on
previous NERC investment. While fitting entirely within international priorities,
the programme will be driven by strategic requirements for the UK and for NERC.
The UK’s unconventional gas resource is estimated to exceed 1000 trillion cubic
feet, sufficient to supply gas demands for decades, providing economic and
environmental benefits and improving the security of energy supply. The aim of this
SPA is to provide the scientific basis that underpins the safe and economical
extraction of unconventional gas in the UK, using the nascent ESIOS system. Of
Sea-Level Rise – Path
from Source to
Coastal Impact
Ionospheric effects on
SAR radar imaging
Urban water
environment and
management
programme
Global assessment of
the function and
diversity of tropical
forests in the 21st
century
Identifying the
potential for
transformational
particular interest is the development and validation of models capable of
simulating the environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing operations in the
subsurface, and the establishment of effective environmental monitoring techniques
for guiding such operations. By doing so, the potential risks associated with
unconventional gas extraction can be better characterised and mitigated before,
during and after hydraulic fracturing operations.
Increased coastal flooding due to climate change and changing sea levels is a
significant threat to society, with an estimated $6 billion in annual global flood
losses in 2005, projected to increase to $52 billion by 2050 due to socio-economic
changes alone1. While the IPCC has projected globally averaged sea-level rise in
the likely range of 0.28 - 0.98 m for the year 21002, there are major differences
between global mean sea-level change, which is an important integral measure of
the change in the climate system, and coastal change, which is the relevant issue
for planning and adaptation. We propose a focused effort to resolve the
processes and elucidate the physics that links different sources of sea-level rise to
changes at our coasts.
Synthetic Aperture Radar is an important tool for a number of environmental
fields and its development more and more relies on its accuracy. There are small
deviations to SAR radar signals which create errors at small but significant scales
and these errors will become more obvious as future research looks to ever
improved resolution. These errors need to be understood by modelling the
ionospheric and atmospheric environments and by studying the variability at small
scales in the observations.
Environmental change and the trends towards expansion and intensification of
urban living present many research challenges for the environment and society in
towns and cities, in the UK and globally. A new NERC programme to address
these issues is needed, to provide multidisciplinary understanding of water in the
city, covering both the present day and future trends and pressures upon
ecosystems, infrastructure, economy, population and health. It would encourage
research which combines scientific understanding and technological innovation at a
wide range of scales from domestic properties, local communities up to City
regions, river basins or catchments including the natural subsurface, and from daily
to multi-decadal time-scales. Research would focus on whole system approaches
and interactions between the urban ecosystem, blue-green infrastructure and
water availability and quality, as well as between the natural, built and human
environment of urban living.
Tropical forests store a quarter of Earth’s living carbon, generate one third of land
productivity, and are home to at least half its species. They are being increasingly
modified by climate and atmospheric change, fragmentation and land-use change,
with poorly understood consequences for regional and global climate, the water
and carbon cycles, and maintenance of ecosystem services. This Idea for a Strategic
Programme seeks to draw together the UK’s tropics-focused scientific community
to determine the consequences of these changes across the pan-tropics for the
function and diversity of tropical forests in the 21st century. It would allow NERC
to: (i) lead the monitoring of the world’s tropical forests from ground, air and
space, to the standards needed for scientific exploitation; (ii) provide a step-change
in understanding the processes that maintain forest function and ecosystem
services; and (iii) develop models that decrease the substantial uncertainty in
projections of Earth’s climate and biodiversity. This requires the UK, with partners,
to harness its world-leading capabilities in ecological processes, tropical forest
properties, biomass, biodiversity, land use change, ecosystem services and drivers
of change, and to integrate these with predictive modelling. A Strategic Programme
would provide a timely early warning system of current and future changes to the
tropical forests that potentially have global environmental, economic and societal
impacts in the 21st century.
This idea is about understanding the coping limits of the natural environment (and
society) to extreme climate events, and at what degree of climate change these
limits are breached such that these systems start to break down irreversibly.
adaptation to climate
change
Towards sustainable
management of the
Critical Zone through
strategic synergistic
use of mechanistic
modelling, and remote
& in-situ sensing
technologies
Predicting the urban
atmosphere across
scales
Causes and
Consequences of
Energetic Charged
Particles in the Earth’s
Atmosphere
Integrated climate
change impacts,
adaptation and
Considered in a natural hazard framework, the idea is about identifying key
vulnerabilities in the natural infrastructure on which human societies depend, and
enabling policymakers to understand when doing ‘more of the same’ in adapting to
climate change is enough, versus when an entirely different approach and way of
thinking (i.e. transformational change) will be needed.
Water, energy, carbon and nutrient cycling in the Critical Zone (CZ; groundwatersoil-plant-atmosphere system) determine key Societal resources. These cycles are
intimately linked and thereby provide management opportunities for mitigating
against, and adapting to, extreme events and environmental change. CZ processes
are increasingly incorporated into land-surface models (LSMs, crucial components
in global climate models, GCMs), providing a means of investigating these CZ
interactions, and management decisions, in a changing climate.
Programmes such as ESA’s Climate Change Initiative (CCI) have collated highquality historical Earth Observation (EO) datasets, while recent EO missions
(SMOS, GRACE) have enabled remote observation of sub-surface processes. In
addition, novel in-situ monitoring techniques, often embedded in networks, also
contribute to unprecedented model-monitoring co-development opportunities.
Yet, current efforts to employ EO/in-situ data in improved CZ understanding are
generally disparate and lack shared strategic efforts between researchers, endusers and stakeholders.
The aim of the proposed programme is for CZ researchers, in partnership with
practitioners, to jointly develop a robust framework to combine high-resolution
near-continuous times series data from various EO systems and sensor networks
with state-of-the-art mechanistic models to work towards better future-prediction
of CZ processes, above-and below-ground. Such data-model fusion systems will
bring about a step change in the understanding, and ultimately management, of the
CZ.
Only a concerted fresh effort will allow us to take optimal advantage of recent and
upcoming EO opportunities, including lightweight sensors aboard Unmanned
Airborne Vehicles (UAVs) and space missions.
EPSRC has just funded a substantial five year research project, MAGIC, under the
Future Cities Grand Challenge programme. The project will develop and apply a
high fidelity air quality (pollutants and temperature) prediction method that links
the indoor and outdoor environments, and is capable of providing local fine scale
resolution output in space and time whilst operating on a domain that might
encompass a whole city. The proposed NERC work will link with this very novel
research to maximize the benefit to the NERC community, in particular NCAS and
the Met. Office.
The British Nobel prize winner C.T.R. Wilson is credited with inventing the cloud
chamber to demonstrate the existence of energetic ionizing radiation in the Earth’s
atmosphere. He also predicted energetic discharge processes above thunderclouds
almost a century ago. However, new experiments have only recently confirmed
such phenomena which are now denoted as transient luminous events, terrestrial
gamma ray flashes and terrestrial electron flashes. The existence of energetic
charged particles in the Earth's atmosphere clearly warrants a quantification of
their importance, because society increasingly relies on sensitive automated
technological systems operating in the Earth’s atmosphere, e.g., from unmanned
aerial vehicles to operational satellites for communications. One of the grand
challenges of our time is to ensure that technological systems operate securely, in
particular for safety critical applications. The basis for such an assessment is a
coordinated interdisciplinary effort towards a broader understanding of the causes
and consequences of energetic charged particles in the Earth’s atmosphere. For
example, have energetic charged particles an impact on technological systems or
are energetic charged particles in part caused by anthropogenic activity? It is
currently not possible to answer these big science questions without speculation.
The UK Government's Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA) process requires
a strong evidence base on which to base its assessment. While groundbreaking in
their own way, neither the first nor second CCRAs involved extensive, in-depth
vulnerability
assessment for the
UK
Accurate satellite
orbit prediction in a
crowded environment
–Whole Atmosphere
Models and Space
Weather resilience
new academic research – they either involved bespoke but limited consultancy
research, or assessments of existing literature. Meanwhile, the scientific
understanding and capability of climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability
has advanced substantially in recent years. However, these are largely focused in
individual fields of study, so literature assessments are therefore often internally
inconsistent. For the 3rd CCRA to be based on the most authoritative and robust
science, there is both a need and an opportunity to carry out a substantial
programme of climate impacts assessments undertaken in a common framework
allowing integration and internal consistency. New UK climate projections will
also become available in the coming years, so the time is right to plan to make the
most of these. It is therefore proposed that NERC establish a strategic programme
area on climate change impacts and adaptation in the UK in order to make good
use of new UK climate projections to provide authoritative advice on impacts in
time for CCRA3.
Low Earth Orbits (LEO) are defined as orbits below 2,000km altitude. Earth
Observation studies benefit from orbits as low as 350km, owing to their larger
footprint on the Earth. LEO satellites are a valuable resource in many areas of
research and environmental monitoring that are important to NERC. Maintaining
their orbits and communications requires precise orbit determination, which
depends on high quality atmospheric modelling.
The number of satellites launched each year has grown phenomenally over the last
decade. In parallel the amount of space debris is so great that the increase of
debris exceeds the losses. However, existing commercial satellite drag models
have barely changed in terms of their physics content since the 1980s. Their focus
has been on increasing computational speed and ease of use; but a reassessment is
now required as the LEO region has become dangerously cluttered. Furthermore,
a predictive capability is imperative, with respect to the influence of Space
Weather. The region above 90km altitude is known as the thermosphere, and it is
highly susceptible to Space Weather. In addition to diurnal temperature changes of
hundreds of Kelvin; electrical currents course through the ionosphere and
generate powerful and localized heating in the thermosphere - creating a difficult,
tempestuous, medium to navigate.
The idea is to use techniques from the meteorological community of data
assimilation and ensemble modelling to drive physics-based global circulation
models. Such models are too slow (hours) for satellite orbit determination
(require tens of seconds), but instead will be used to provide weighted probability
orbit scenarios in a similar way to weather forecasts.