Author: Jessica Thorn27 January 2016

Main News

A legal commitment from NERC is required, in order to provide NC funding to operate these stations. Therefore NERC are keen to uncover any dependencies on third parties implicit in this commitment. We have compiled a ‘due diligence’ spreadsheet which has been circulated to UNEXE, PML, NOC, NCAS and CEH to enable the collation of this information. The required information has now been collated and passed to Ian Wright f
or consideration by NOC prior to it being more widely distributed. We anticipate making the formal application before the end of March 2016.

Once the UK submission is made it will be possible for non NERC funded stations to be added at a later date. We hope that the initiative lead by Tarquin Dorrington at DEFRA will allow the UK community to make a collective submission to non NERC government departments to allow this to happen.

Other NewsThe ICOS ERIC 1st General Assembly was held in Helsinki on Thursday, 10th December 2015, with delegates from all nine member and observer countries taking part.

Photo from ICOS RI:

We are spending some time thinking about the OTC and in ensuring that the activities within the UK and across to Bergen are coordinated well. For example, Charlie Morgan works with the International Shipping Company but represents the legal aspect for UK-ICOS at NOC. Andrew Watson and his team are currently working on the design of a pCO2 system to go into a wave glider which will constitute a valuable OTC activity.

Charlie Morgan has drafted a letter from the Centre Directors requesting that NERC apply to join ICOS, with the due diligence spreadsheet attached for consideration. We anticipate sending it to NERC and other interested parties shortly.

There is a planned third joint ICOS ocean MSA and OTC meeting in Bergen. The aim of the meeting is to agree upon the procedures for the station labelling stage 2. In this stage we need to define, L1 and L2 ICOS stations, on the categories VOS, GI-Ship and Fixed Stations, and how to deal with other promising approaches as floats, gliders andwaveriders etc.

Procedures on some of the coastal approaches involving towers need to be developed. Both ETC and ATC include these platforms and we need to define if some additional requirements is needed related to the ocean.