US-UK Climate Consequences of Rapid Ocean Changes (CCROC) Scheme

Funding opportunity for collaborative research projects featuring scientists from the UK and US to improve climate change projections across the North Atlantic region.

The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is working with the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to offer funding under the US-UK Climate Consequences of Rapid Ocean Changes (CCROC) Scheme. This opportunity is for a joint UK-US project to improve understanding of the Atlantic Meridional Overturing Circulation (AMOC) and improve climate change projections across the North Atlantic region.

The Rapid Climate Change (RAPID) and Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program (OSNAP) observing systems have been running for a decade. The CCROC programme will take advantage of RAPID and OSNAP data to deliver enhanced understanding of AMOC and improve projections of future climate change throughout the North Atlantic region. The programme will also deliver research to enable the future transformation of AMOC observations by taking advantage of alternative observing and modelling approaches in a way that will allow for a more sustainable and lower cost future AMOC observing system.

CCROC’s aims will be delivered through six challenges. This funding opportunity will focus on challenges two to six, as follows:

• Challenge two: Determining the heat and freshwater budgets of the North Atlantic Ocean using observations and models.
• Challenge three: Using RAPID and OSNAP AMOC observations to establish the predictability of North Atlantic sector climate.
• Challenge four: Coastal and shelf sea level and AMOC.
• Challenge five: Monitoring the AMOC temporal and spatial evolution through indirect observations.
• Challenge six: Enhanced understanding of carbon accumulation in the North Atlantic by combining models and ocean transport observations.

Applicants should apply for funding to address one of the challenges. (Challenge one, which is not included in this funding call, is: Design and demonstration of a more sustainable, lower cost, RAPID 26˚N observing system for future observations of the AMOC.)

Through the delivery of the programme’s challenges, the outcomes of this programme will:

• Determine the controls on the heat and freshwater budgets of the North Atlantic Ocean by combining longer term (more than five years) observations of the AMOC with ocean climate models.
• Understand the role of AMOC in seasonal to interannual climate predictability, leading to improved predictive capability from models.
• Determine how the AMOC impacts circum-Atlantic changes in sea level.
• Determine the feasibility of using indirect measurements to monitor the AMOC.
• Provide an improved understanding of the accumulation of anthropogenic carbon in the North Atlantic.
• Provide an appraisal of transformational observation and modelling approaches that will allow for North Atlantic observations to be sustained at much reduced cost.
• Deliver an implementation plan to enable the transformation of the current configuration of the UK-US RAPID observing system to a more sustainable, lower cost, system for AMOC observations by the end of current US-UK funding in 2026 to 2027.

All projects must be collaborative and include UK and US scientists. One integrated proposal should be submitted to NERC detailing both the UK and US contributions to the project. Proposals addressing challenges three, four and five are encouraged to consider engaging with the UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre.