NCEO awarded renewed investment in national research capabilities by the Natural Environment Research Council

The award was recently announced as part of £101 million support for the work of leading UK environmental research centres including NCEO and its ongoing research activities at the School. 

The £8.6M awarded to NCEO will deliver a programme of work translating multiscale Earth Observation data from novel, UK-supported satellites and models into global datasets, scientific knowledge and actionable information that benefits wider science, policy and business communities. It draws on decades of world-leading UK expertise and international collaboration to address the most urgent challenges (e.g., societal climate impacts) by understanding changes in the carbon cycle, air pollution and methane, energy & water cycles and their influence on disruptive events (e.g., wildfires).

Prof Paul Palmer, the School's Personal Chair for Quantitative Earth Observation, who serves as NCEO's Science Director at the University of Edinburgh, said: 

“This investment will enable continued scientific breakthroughs about the Earth system led by NCEO researchers. It will also help us to support the needs of UK and international environmental science communities to develop and enhance the use of Earth Observation data across the public and private sectors.

Within my own institute, this funding will allow us to continue documenting the dramatic shifts in our natural environment caused by climate change. It will enable us to monitor the rapid changes to the carbon cycle and air pollution that impact ecosystems and human health worldwide.”

The new funding will enable NCEO scientists and researchers at the School to: 

• Produce more accurate datasets which enable scientists to narrow down the predicted pathways for the next decades of climate change;
• To better understand the energy cycle and its imbalance which reflects climate change;
• To improve estimates of forest, ocean and atmosphere carbon amounts;
• Study the way in which the atmosphere and its chemistry works on a global scale; improve weather and climate prediction;
• Underpin UK expertise at the heart of studies of wildfires.

NCEO is NERC’s dedicated centre to the study and exploitation of remotely sensed Earth Observation data, principally from satellites. NCEO researchers work with colleagues across the (inter)national environmental science communities to develop and enhance Earth Observation data, translating the raw observations into scientific knowledge and actionable information that benefits wider UK science and policy. 

NCEO is a distributed research centre with over 150 scientists located across the UK in 13 UK universities and research institutions. NCEO HQ and the Executive Director are based at Space Park Leicester and hosted by the University of Leicester.