SummaryThis project involves collaboration between three institutions, Huddersfield University and the Universities of York and Southampton with additional technical supervision from the University of Cambridge and Atkins Consultants Ltd. The project concept arose out of the EPSRC Ideas Factory 'A Noisy Future? Making the World sound better', January 2006. There are three related themes with associated work packages: acoustic source recognition and characterisation, source localisation using networks, and instrument applications. The output of the three themes is combined in a fourth work package which is the development of the instrument itself. A fifth work package deals specifically with liaison between the team members and with the external supervision.

Coastal aquifers are valuable resources of fresh water for domestic and industrial use. However, over-abstraction leaves them at risk of contamination by saltwater, which migrates into the aquifer in response to abstraction. Detecting and monitoring the movement of saltwater is difficult, as the methods currently available rely on data acquired at production or monitoring wells. Consequently, it is typically of low spatial resolution. Moreover, once saltwater reaches the production well(s), it is too late to take action; that region of the aquifer has already been contaminated. This problem is exacerbated in chalk aquifers owing to their dual porosity behaviour and high transmissivity. The aim of this project is to develop new technology, based on measurements of electrical potential (the so-called spontaneous- or self-potential), to detect and monitor the movement of saltwater during freshwater abstraction. The electrical potential is measured using electrodes installed at the earth surface and/or in production or monitoring wells. The advantage of the technique is that saline fronts may be monitored while they are several tens to hundreds of metres away from the monitoring location. Consequently, saline water moving into an aquifer may be detected before it reaches the abstraction well(s), allowing abstraction to be managed proactively so as to avoid widespread contamination of the aquifer. The innovative, multidisciplinary project builds on existing work undertaken at Imperial College, in which measurements of the spontaneous potential, acquired from electrodes permanently installed downhole, are used to monitor water movement in oil or gas reservoirs during production. The underlying rationale in hydrocarbon applications is similar, in that waterfronts may be monitored while they are several tens to hundreds of metres away from the production well, allowing production to be managed proactively so as to avoid excessive unwanted water. This is contaminated and so expensive to treat and dispose of. The project will provide new experimental data, which is required to model and interpret measurements of spontaneous potential in coastal chalk aquifers. The project will also use numerical modeling to determine whether the saline front can be detected and monitored, and over what distances and at what spatial and temporal resolution. Finally, the utility of the method will be demonstrated at a well-characterized chalk aquifer test site, via field experiments in which small volumes of saline water are injected and the resulting electrical signals are measured. This is an essential step to establish credibility prior to deployment in a commercial abstraction project. The results will be of direct benefit to UK plc, because they contribute to the sustainable management of water resources, helping to preserve and maintain these as demand continues to increase. See the attached document 'Case for Support' for further details of the scientific case, aims and objectives, and scope of work.

Objectives are stated in the previous section and are further elaborated in the Case for Support. The impact on project partners will be an improved understanding of the phenomenon of single event effects at ground level and the risk from an ESW event. This topic has hitherto focused on the quiescent background galactic cosmic ray environment, with very little attention paid to enhancements during space weather events. By reviewing the likelihood and potential impact of these events, the project will raise awareness of the topic within the partner organisations and, in due course, within the wider industries in which they operate. The main outcome will be a risk assessment of the vulnerability of ground-level electronic systems to SEE during an ESW event. SEE rates and failure probabilities will be calculated and used to determine what (if any) mitigation protocols are required to reduce the risk. Industry partners will be able to reduce the vulnerability of their systems using a variety of methods, including improving their procurement of electronic components based on resilience criteria and increasing failure tolerance through system design. The results may also be used to evaluate the need for retrofitting resilience measures to existing systems, though this is a consideration for the partners alone and the project will not make unilateral recommendations in this regard.

The modern world is increasing reliant on systems that make use of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), perhaps the most well know of which is GPS. These include the 'Satnav' in cars or mobile phones. However, in addition to its use in transport (road, air, rail and maritime), GNSS is used a wide range of other applications including surveying, emergency services, agriculture, mobile communications and financial transactions. In a 2011 report from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council it was estimated that 800 billion euro of gross domestic product (GDP) in the European Union, was then dependent on satellite radio navigation. A Royal Academy of Engineering report of the same year suggested that Services that depend on GNSS for positioning, navigation or timing (PNT), either directly or indirectly, "should document this as part of their service descriptions and explain their contingency plans for GNSS outages". We will provide, to our partners, global maps of risk of such outages, caused by ionospheric scintillation, a major result of space-weather affecting the ionosphere. Scintillation is where there are such rapid changes in the radio signal from a GNSS satellite that a receiver cannot 'lock on' to the signal and so cannot use this signal for navigation or timing. Scintillation is common at both high and low latitudes, but can on occasions extend to middle latitudes such as the UK, Europe and the United States. For example, during the 'Halloween' solar storm in October 2003, the United States Federal Aviation Administration Wide-Area Augmentation System (WAAS) network for air navigation was disabled for 30 hours, primarily due to scintillation. Our work is timely as the use of GNSS is so ubiquitous that a recent (June 2017) Innovate UK report estimated that the impact in the UK alone to a five-day disruption to GNSS would be in excess of £5 billion through direct losses and knock-on delays caused. £110 million of this was in the rail sector, an area of particular interest to our project partners. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/619544/17.3254_Economic_impact_to_UK_of_a_disruption_to_GNSS_-_Full_Report.pdf http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/lowres-Severe-Space-Weather-FINAL.pdf http://www.raeng.org.uk/publications/reports/global-navigation-space-systems

The parameters that are used to define a sound-field are necessarily governed by what is practical to measure. Predominantly sound is characterised by the A-weighted sound pressure level at a point and has remained so since the earliest sound level meters; partly as a result of this, most legislative controls and guidance are expressed in terms of A-weighted levels, often averaged over long periods of time (typically the hours of daytime and night-time). However, advances in technology mean that it may be possible for a sound meters to discriminate between and localise sound sources so it becomes possible to characterise a sound field in terms of the relative contribution of different sources. This is a significant departure from existing meters which are able to provide a detailed analysis of the characteristics of the sound at the measurement position but are not able to provide information directly on the source(s) contributing to sound at the measurement position. Such a meter could have a significant impact on planning guidance, for example, where it would be possible to consider both 'positive' sound sources (e.g. natural sounds such as a waterfall or birdsong) and 'negative' noise sources (e.g. highways, industrial processes). It would also be possible to identify potentially rare but loud sources (such as over-flying by military aircraft) which may make only a small contribution to averaged levels but which could be a source of great annoyance - currently this is only possible with attended monitoring (where the individuals remain with the sound meter) or by laborious analysis of audio recordings (which is not feasible in many instances).