This Fellowship, which will be hosted at the Scottish Centre of Excellence in Satellite Applications (SoXSA), will generate links between the NERC Marine Science and Satellite Applications communities in order to accelerate the impact of NERC research. The Fellowship will exploit the existing links of SoXSA in key sectors such as energy and make use of partnerships with Scottish Enterprise, the Offshore Renewables Energy (ORE) Catapult and other Catapults across the UK to translate NERC research to new stakeholders. Establishing links between fundamental research and new industrial and governmental end-users will allow the existing NERC activities and datasets to be exploited further than is currently achievable.

The Fellowship aims to create impact from existing NERC research which uses satellite data to provide information about the marine environment; this includes University of Strathclyde research within the Physics department, and more widely throughout Scotland with institutions such as the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS). This Fellowship will also generate new datasets that use a combination of data sources, such as satellite, drifter and automated underwater vehicle (AUV) data, to give variations in spatial scales. These new data sets will offer considerable new applications for implementation in a variety of industry sectors.

This Fellowship will work in partnership with a variety of organisations including: academic institutions, such as Heriot-Watt and the University of Edinburgh; Catapult Centres, including Satellite Applications Catapult and ORE; NERC research and data centres, such as SAMS, the National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) and the Polar Data Centre; Scottish Innovation Centres in sensors & imaging systems (CENSIS) and Oil & Gas (OGIC); and Scottish Enterprise. Existing connections to other NERC Fellows will also continue to be strengthened throughout the duration of the Fellowship.