King's College London

The £8.6M awarded to the National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) will deliver a programme of work translating multiscale Earth Observation data from a series of international environmental satellites and models into global datasets, scientific knowledge and actionable information.

NCEO’s node hosted at King’s College London are coordinating the work around global landscape fire and its impacts.

Such fires burn around 5% of the Earth's surface every year, and work involving King's scientists suggests that smoke from these fires maybe responsible for 1 in 10 deaths in the under-fives worldwide.

Professor Martin Wooster, Chair of Earth Observation Science and NCEO Divisional Director at King’s College London said: "We are thrilled to announce that 'Multi-Scale Fires in the Earth System' is for the first time a discrete, dedicated strand of work within NCEO’s renewed science programme.

"This new long-term funding will strengthen our work to understand how different landscape fires affect Earth's environment and its population, and how this may change in future."

Worldwide exposure to smoke polluted air is now recognised as a major global health issue, and we need to know how these impacts may change in response to the types of fire activity variations that may result from climate change and other human activity divers, he added.

Within the renewed 5-yr research programme, research will focus on exploiting the constantly improving observation and modelling capability that King’s has become known for.

It will also quantify the cross-cutting significance of this highly dynamic aspect of the Earth System, which ranges from recurrent annual forest, agricultural, savannah and deforestation burns, to sporadic peatland fires and mega-wildfire events.

Professor John Remedios, Executive Director of NCEO said: “This welcome investment gives a timely boost to the exploitation of new Earth-observing satellites, each of which is designed to meet important science and policy challenges connected to climate change. NCEO’s world-leading teams will work with the UK science and business community to derive unprecedented data with which to understand our planet, deliver on UK aspirations in space and provide value from UK-supported, Earth-focussed space missions. “

The National Centre for Earth Observation is NERC’s dedicated centre to the study and exploitation of remotely sensed Earth Observation data, principally from satellites.

The funding is part of a wider £101 million investment into the work of leading UK environmental research centres.

The new funding will enable NCEO scientists to produce more accurate datasets which enable scientists to narrow down the predicted pathways for the next decades of climate change; to understand better 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 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.