NCEO Single Centre EO Science for the 2020s

Contemporary changes in Earth's climate are largely driven by human activities that perturb the physical, chemical, and biological processes on the land and in the oceans and atmosphere across a multitude of different spatial and temporal scales. Impacts of these changes are profound, affecting the health and livelihood of billions of people and the broader planetary health. Earth Observation data provide an unprecedented, long-term, and increasingly detailed view of these changes. The data collected allow us to study how short-term, local perturbations are superimposed on longer-term, global change, enabling us to better understand the different processes involved, and the linkages between them. The central aim of the National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) is to harness these data and translate them into scientific knowledge and actionable information that benefits the wider science and policy communities, drawing on decades of world-leading UK expertise and international collaboration. NCEO science foci address compelling, urgent, and enduring environmental challenges that both define the limits of climate knowledge and have profound societal impacts: quantifying and understanding changes in the carbon cycle, air pollution, and the energy and water cycles and how these are inter-linked. Our science-led foci are at the forefront of environmental science, affected by competing global and regional pressures from climate change, urbanization, and growing populations. How do we quantify more accurately land fluxes of CO2 and link those to improved estimates for changes in terrestrial carbon stocks due to disturbance and changes in climate? How do we harness EO data to improve our model representation of ocean carbon fluxes? Which are the key land-surface and atmospheric processes that are responsible for changes in atmospheric methane? How can we better understand observed changes in surface ozone? How well do we understand changes in the coupled energy and water cycles? Where and how are landscape fire impacts most significant, and how might these be shifting? Addressing these challenges draws on extensive experience and capability in NCEO and the capacity to work across spatial and temporal scales to fully unlock the scientific insights of the rapidly expanding range of EO data. This unifying multiscale theme to our proposal is enabled by the development of new sensor technologies and cutting-edge scientific analysis tools and is underpinned by world-leading research on data assimilation, machine learning, and uncertainty quantification that allows us and the wider community to make the most of these data for model predictions, reanalysis, and improved process understanding. Our 10 year strategic outcomes are ambitious: - The world has new EO-driven decision systems and reliable diagnostic monitoring of the Earth system - Earth system data assimilation gives km-scale predictability, informing people of their local climate trajectories. - Integrated carbon systems deliver robust, fine-scale information for global stocktakes and offsets. - Improved assessments for methane and ozone set pathways for climate and pollution control. - Compound risk assessments provide improved knowledge of climate hazards - Interrogation of fire regimes leads to short-term predictive capability. NCEO delivers national capability to the wider UK environmental science community - capabilities that are not available elsewhere in the UK - that focus on science challenges that are global and decadal in scale. Our team includes world-leading researchers that help influence UK and international science agendas, particularly around climate. Consequently, we are the focal point for providing impartial, informed advice to UK Government department that help them with policy development. Our privileged position also enables us to train the next generation of EO scientists and promote their subsequent career development.