Title: Advanced UK Observing Network For Air Quality, Public Heath and Greenhouse Gas Research
Funder: Natural Environment Research Council

Abstract: Advanced UK Observing Network For Air Quality, Public Heath and Greenhouse Gas Research Emissions of gases and particles to the atmosphere have profound effects across geographic scales, from the very local, on individuals, to the global climate system. Air pollutants include short-lived species that affect human health and damage ecosystems and longer-lived gases that impact on climate processes and stratospheric ozone. There are major outstanding scientific uncertainties associated with measuring i) the emissions, transformations and impacts of air pollution on public health, ii) the natural and man-made budgets of greenhouse gases and iii) the changing nature of ozone depleting chemicals. This is science that is globally significant but that has direct and urgent UK relevance. Science gaps currently limit the effectiveness of efforts to reduce the national health costs of pollution and ecosystem damage, and they create major uncertainties in the delivery of cost-effective greenhouse gas reductions and industry actions to support the recovery of stratospheric ozone. New capital investment is required in a transformative and open access research infrastructure for the UK to support world-leading scientific research in the atmospheric sciences and to deliver key evidence to Government as a co-benefit. The investment will support the UK in its efforts to improve air quality in cities by providing direct evidence of pollution composition, trends and where actions would be effective. Consequently, it will enhance the UK capacity to meet European and national targets for human pollution exposure, for ozone ecosystem exposure, the National Emissions Ceiling Directive and trans-boundary Gothenburg protocol. It will provide unique high precision information on national emissions of greenhouse gases that will demonstrate UK commitments to, and compliance with, its own legally binding targets set out in Climate Change Act and UK actions via UNFCCC, Paris and Montreal Agreements. It will generate science that will give the UK a leadership position for developing global policy on new emerging chemicals, but also provide science that can be used practically at the local scale by individual cities and Local Authorities. All these evidential requirements, if met, have the potential to generate large financial savings (in health costs), economic opportunities for business through effective carbon reduction strategies and improvements in quality of life. The investment would support a new integrated network of long-term atmospheric facilities for research permanently located in the UK: i) New urban air pollution research observatories ("supersites") located in central Manchester, Birmingham and London. ii) A new real-world road transport emissions research capability supporting to improve emissions inventories iii) An upgraded national research system for the quantification of UK greenhouse gases, their sources, sinks and emission rates, including improved national calibration facilities for long-lived gases. The investment builds on existing observatory infrastructure in the UK, adding state of the art research instrumentation to some strategically located Defra air pollution monitoring stations in UK cities and to the network of telecoms tall-towers used to verify UK emissions inventories. The capital required is £4.3M in total, predominately composed of commercially available instrumentation, plus some expenditure on bespoke software and data integration capability. The proposal is to deliver the concept by end of 2018. Annual resource/recurrent costs for operation are anticipated to be of the order 8% of capital, and have been confirmed from a mix of sources including HEIs, NERC national capability and other external agencies including Defra, DfT, and Local Authorities.


Research activity codes: 8.3 POLICY, ETHICS AND RESEARCH GOVERNANCE;2.6 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (AETIOLOGY)
Health categories: RESPIRATORY;GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE