EARTH OBSERVATION AND ASTRONOMICAL INSTRUMENTATION

The Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM) provides UK national capability in satellite observations and numerical modelling of Earth’s polar regions. Our mission is to understand how their ice, oceans, and climate are changing. 

We are a community of UK universities led by Northumbria University working in partnership with the British Antarctic Survey on behalf of the Natural Environment Research Council. 

Earth Observation techniques give us unprecedented access to the polar regions, providing continuous information about sea ice and ice sheets.  We use several different Earth Observation tools and techniques to study the cryosphere, including Altimetry, InSAR and Gravimetry.

We work in close collaboration with the space agencies such as ESA and NASA to make use of EO datasets for improving our knowledge of the cryosphere and design future satellite missions to monitor the Polar Regions. We are leading international initiatives such as IMBIE to reconcile satellite estimates of ice sheet mass balance, providing robust estimates of the contributions of Greenland and Antarctica to sea level rise to a range of stakeholders including to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).