£8.4M has been awarded to the British Antarctic Survey and the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling to deliver the next 5 years of their long-term polar science activities. The UK Polar Research Expertise for Science and Society (PRESCIENT) programme provides UK national capability (science, such as ongoing datasets and models, which underpins wider scientific research) to understand the impacts of environmental stressors, such as rising global temperatures on polar marine ecosystems. PRESCIENT will also measure and predict polar ice sheet contributions to global sea level rise and extend and improve measurements of changes to polar sea ice.
Announced today the funding is part of £101 million investment by the Natural Environment Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation, in the UK’s network of leading environmental science research centres to support large-scale environmental observations, modelling and analysis, and research capabilities through innovations in platforms, sensors and data science. These data are crucial for managing natural resources, biodiversity, human health and building our understanding of and resilience to environmental hazards and climate change. It underpins science across the UK’s environmental research sector and supports critical scientific advice to government.
PRESCIENT will also aid the BAS transition to low carbon science delivery, by progressing delivery of airborne science using remotely piloted autonomous systems (RPAS), while delivering independent scientific advice and support to a range of stakeholders in government, business, and wider society, ensuring that our scientific activities and expertise is available to support solutions.
National capability is research funding which, unlike shorter term projects, can span decades and provides ongoing support for large-scale, complex scientific projects of national significance, informing strategic needs and decision-making of the country. Using techniques such as satellite altimetry to study ice motion and the polar oceans, CPOM incorporate the results into models used across the polar research community. CPOM’s data sets and models have been developed and maintained for almost a quarter of a century, and the long-term maintenance of this capability helps provide robust understanding and insights of the cryosphere.
CPOM also contribute to a range of interdisciplinary multi-centre National Capability research projects including CANARI, BIOPOLE, and TerraFIRMA, which have been running since 2022, offering satellite derived estimates of aspects of the cryosphere (such as ice thickness, floe size and sea height), as well as developing advanced simulations. The longevity of our datasets, and the accuracy of our models mean we have a broader view of past and possible future changes. By contributing to projects such as the previous multi-centre National Capability project UKESM (UK Earth System Model), integrating ice sheet model and advanced sea ice physics into the system, we can produce robust projections of ice sheet instability and Arctic sea ice loss, thereby informing sea level rise predictions. Our PRESCIENT programme with BAS continues this work into 2029.
This funding has been awarded from NERC’s National Capability Single Centre Science initiative, one of the UK’s largest environmental science investment programmes.
Read more on the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) website.
