POMP will advance the scientific understanding of how climate change impacts biodiversity and carbon sequestration potential in emerging and rapidly changing polar marine ecosystems, and, through these impacts, the project will evaluate how resilience and adaptation potential in the polar regions are being altered. The aim is to provide new quantitative knowledge of the mitigation potential of blue carbon in emerging coastal and oceanic habitats and to assess the scope for their inclusion in carbon accounting at national and international levels. Our approach is to study each step in the biological carbon flow from CO2-capture by primary producers, through transformations and intermediate storage, to long-term sequestration. We will do this by combining analyses of new and existing data at several Arctic and Antarctic Learning Sites and use this to develop and validate new ecosystem models and remote sensing algorithms. These will then be used to provide large-scale assessments of changes in blue carbon habitat distributions and their CO2 capture and sequestration potential, both now and in the future. The new knowledge generated will be presented to the scientific community and to decision makers and managers as policy briefs to guide the designation of marine protected areas that recognize both diversity and blue carbon potential. The POMP consortium is highly qualified to meet this task with world-leading experts on blue carbon and climate change impacts in the polar regions, and partners that bring together scientific expertise, extensive unpublished data, polar infrastructure, and unique sampling opportunities as well as experience and resources from several national and EU projects directly related to this call. Participation of three Canadian partners eligible for national funding assures excellent opportunities for cross Atlantic collaboration with a pan-Arctic focus.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Our society is increasingly reliant upon technological infrastructure that orbits in the harsh and highly dynamic radiation environment of near-Earth space. Low-cost access to space is driving a rapid increase in the number of satellites on orbit (e.g., Starlink, Oneweb), many of which use electronics that are untested during active solar conditions, such as the upcoming solar maximum in 2024-2025. This proposal will make a significant advance in the understanding of the radiation environment in which these satellites operate. Space was a £16.5 Bn UK industry in 2019/2020 and severe space weather was added to the National Risk Register in 2011, owned by the Met Office who provide space weather services to the satellite industry. However, current forecasting models, including the BAS Radiation Belt Model (BAS-RBM) that provides forecasts to the Met Office and European Space Agency, only forecast the highest energy electrons and the associated risk of damage from internal charging. The Met Office currently has no capability to forecast the lower energy electrons that can cause surface charging damage and be energised to become so-called 'killer' electrons. The radiation environment is highly dynamic and includes several different populations of electrons, identified by their energy ranges. The lowest energy electrons form the background plasma, medium energy electrons are found in the ring current, and the highest energy electrons form the radiation belts. These have historically been studied independently but the populations are interdependent, and recent research has highlighted that they need to be studied as a single system. For example, the highest energy killer electrons are produced when lower energy electrons are energised by electromagnetic waves. These waves are generated by the medium energy electrons and the acceleration is most effective in regions with a depleted background plasma. This proposal aims to establish how the populations and their interactions contribute to the variability of the radiation environment. We will determine which solar wind conditions produce the most effective wave-electron interactions, quantify the role of realistic magnetic fields on the loss and energisation of electrons, and determine how the interactions of the different populations affect the radiation environment in key types of space weather events. This will significantly increase our understanding of the conditions that lead to radiation environments that may damage satellites. These studies require a combination of data analysis and modelling. A few models can study multiple populations, but they all initially addressed a single population using an appropriate framework for that population. Extending to include another population meant incorporating an additional framework, introducing interpolation errors and inconsistencies. For example, although these models use realistic magnetic field models for part of the calculation, they assume a dipole magnetic field to model the wave-electron interactions. Building on our BAS-RBM experience, we will adopt a novel approach using a unifying framework for all three populations that can also include realistic magnetic and electric fields. To be consistent we will also develop the first comprehensive characterisations of wave-electron interactions in realistic magnetic fields. Using observations from spacecraft such as the Van Allen Probes, together with this new modelling framework, we will address the causes of variability in the radiation environment. The model created for these studies will also be able to provide improved predictions of the conditions leading to internal charging on satellites and a new ability to address surface charging.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The ocean holds fifty times as much carbon as is in the atmosphere. Biological processes contribute to storing carbon in the ocean on climate-relevant timescales (hundreds to thousands of years). Marine phytoplankton (drifting microscopic plants) use sunlight and carbon dioxide in the upper ocean to form their bodies which are rich in carbon. When phytoplankton die they might clump together and sink into the ocean interior, or they could be eaten by zooplankton (tiny animals) which produce fecal pellets that can sink rapidly. Once this organic carbon is deeper in the water, bacteria might colonise the particles and break them down, or they could be broken apart by zooplankton feeding on them. These processes all act to reduce the amount of organic carbon reaching the deep ocean, however the deeper it goes the longer it will remain out of contact with the atmosphere. This "biological carbon pump" helps to regulate our climate, and without biology in the ocean it has been shown that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could be nearly double what they are today. Earth system models have differing, but all fairly simple, representations of the biological carbon pump due to a lack of understanding of how the processes contributing to particle formation and respiration function. The suite of models that contribute to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports do not agree on the magnitude or direction of change for ocean carbon storage under future climate scenarios. This means we have low confidence for our future projections of ocean carbon storage, which is further impeded by a growing discrepancy between models and observations. In this project we will examine how much carbon has been respired during the transit from the upper ocean, and in what ways. We will measure the important processes of particle fragmentation and aggregation, microbial respiration, and zooplankton vertical migration and respiration. We will do this using a process cruise and autonomous underwater vehicles. We seek to answer the question: How is organic matter transformed and respired by biotic interactions in the mesopelagic, how does that vary with depth, location and season, and what are the consequences for ocean carbon storage? The ultimate goal is to generate new detailed understanding of important processes that influence the rate and depth of interior respiration which we will scale up to provide the globally-resolved information needed to develop the next generation of biogeochemical models.