The Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre (IMCRC) will undertake a wide variety of work in the Manufacturing, Construction and product design areas. The work will be contained within 5 programmes:1. Transforming Organisations / Providing individuals, organisations, sectors and regions with the dynamic and innovative capability to thrive in a complex and uncertain future2. High Value Assets / Delivering tools, techniques and designs to maximise the through-life value of high capital cost, long life physical assets3. Healthy & Secure Future / Meeting the growing need for products & environments that promote health, safety and security4. Next Generation Technologies / The future materials, processes, production and information systems to deliver products to the customer5. Customised Products / The design and optimisation techniques to deliver customer specific products.Academics within the Loughborough IMCRC have an internationally leading track record in these areas and a history of strong collaborations to gear IMCRC capabilities with the complementary strengths of external groups.Innovative activities are increasingly distributed across the value chain. The impressive scope of the IMCRC helps us mirror this industrial reality, and enhances knowledge transfer. This advantage of the size and diversity of activities within the IMCRC compared with other smaller UK centres gives the Loughborough IMCRC a leading role in this technology and value chain integration area. Loughborough IMCRC as by far the biggest IMRC (in terms of number of academics, researchers and in funding) can take a more holistic approach and has the skills to generate, identify and integrate expertise from elsewhere as required. Therefore, a large proportion of the Centre funding (approximately 50%) will be allocated to Integration projects or Grand Challenges that cover a spectrum of expertise.The Centre covers a wide range of activities from Concept to Creation.The activities of the Centre will take place in collaboration with the world's best researchers in the UK and abroad. The academics within the Centre will be organised into 3 Research Units so that they can be co-ordinated effectively and can cooperate on Programmes.

We will develop a data science of the natural environment, deploying modern machine learning and statistical techniques to enable better-informed decision-making as our climate changes. While an explosion in data science research has fuelled enormous advances in areas as diverse as eCommerce and marketing, smart cities, logistics and transport, health and wellbeing, these tools have yet to be fully deployed in one of the most pressing problems facing humanity, that of mitigating and adapting to climate change. This project brings together world-leading statisticians, computer scientists and environmental scientists alongside an extensive array of key public and private stakeholder organisations to effect a step change in data culture in the environmental sciences. The project will develop a new approach to data science of the natural environment driven by three representative grand challenges of environmental science: predicting ice sheet melt, modelling and mitigating poor air quality, and managing land use for maximal societal benefit. In each motivational challenge, there is already an extensive scientific expertise, with intricate models of processes at multiple scales. However this sophisticated modelling of system components is usually let down by naive integration of these components together, and inadequate calibration to observed data. The consequence is poor predictions with a high level of uncertainty and hence poorly-informed policy making. As new forms of environmental data become available, and the pressures on our natural environment from climate change increase, this gap is becoming a pressing concern, and we bring an impressive team to bear on the problem. A key theme of the project is integration, developing a suite of novel data science tools which work together in a modular fashion, and with existing scientifically-informed process models. By building a team that spans the inter-disciplinary divisions between data and environmental scientists we can ensure the necessary interoperability of methods that is currently lacking. Working with the full range of stakeholder environmental organisations will enable continual co-design of the programme and training of end-user scientists to ensure a reduction of the skills gap in this area. The resultant culture shift in the data literacy of the environmental sciences will enable better decision-making as climate change places ever greater strains on our society.

Predicting future climate change is intimately linked to understanding what is happening to the climate system in the present, and in the recent past. Studies in the Polar Regions provide vital clues in our understanding of global climate, and early indications of changes arising from the coupling of natural processes, such as variability in the amount of energy from the Sun reaching the Earth, and man-made factors. For example, the polar winter provides the extreme cold, dark conditions in the atmosphere which, combined with chemicals released from man-made chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases, has led to destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer 18-25 km above the ground every spring-time since the 1980's. The Southern hemisphere ozone 'hole' is now linked to observed changes in surface temperature and sea-ice across Antarctica, decreased uptake of carbon dioxide by the Southern Ocean, and perturbations to the atmospheric circulation that can affect weather patterns as far away as the Northern hemisphere. Recovery of the ozone layer is expected now that CFC's are banned by international protocols, but this may be delayed by other greenhouse gases we are releasing into the atmosphere and natural processes including changes in the Sun's output. Although the total amount of energy as sunlight changes by a small amount (~0.1%) over the typical 11-year solar cycle, the energetic electrons and protons streaming from the Sun changes dramatically on timescales from hours to years. These particles are guided by the Earth's magnetic field and can enter the upper atmosphere, most intensely over the Polar Regions. A visible effect is the aurora, but the particles can also significantly modify the chemistry of the atmosphere down to the stratospheric ozone layer. Powerful solar storms can also damage satellites and disrupt electrical power networks. However the mechanisms by which energetic electrons generated by the Sun enter the Earth's atmosphere, and the complex, interacting processes that affect stratospheric ozone are not well understood, which limits our ability to accurately predict future ozone changes and impacts on climate. We propose answering major unresolved questions about the impact of energetic electrons on stratospheric ozone by making observations of the middle atmosphere from Halley station in Antarctica. This location is directly under the main region where energetic electrons enter the atmosphere, making it ideal to observe the resulting effects. We will install a state-of-the-art microwave radiometer there alongside other equipment run by BAS scientists. By analysing the microwaves naturally emitted by the atmosphere high above us we can work out how much ozone there is 30-90 km above the ground as well as measuring chemicals produced in the atmosphere by energetic electrons that affect ozone. We will make observations throughout two complete Antarctic years/winters (1/2013-2/2015) and interpret them with the help of data from spacecraft that orbit the Earth and measure the energetic electrons entering the atmosphere. We will use the Antarctic observations and develop computer-based models to better understand the impact of energetic electrons on the atmosphere. The ultimate goal is to further understanding of the processes that lead to climate variability in the Polar Regions and globally - highly relevant for UK environmental science and collaborative research at an international level in which BAS and Leeds play a key role.