AERIS aims to build an international, cross-sectoral network to advance atmospheric sciences by improving vertically-resolved atmospheric characterization techniques, including near-surface regions. The project unites European academic and commercial institutions with North and South American partners (LALINET). AERIS enhances measurement techniques, connects international observation programs, and creates opportunities for early warning systems, business innovation, and job creation. The main objective is to advance retrieval capabilities for biogenic and non-biogenic aerosols over South America, enabling data with applications in health, hydrology, air quality, and climate. This will support a regional early warning system with global implications, benefiting aviation, biodiversity, and space mission validation. Specific goals include: (1) Implementing quality assurance and calibration for vertically resolved and near-surface measurements; (2) Optimizing inversion algorithms for aerosol property retrievals; (3) Enhancing synergies between instruments to improve spatial and temporal data; (4) Developing predictive models linking aerosols to health impacts; and (5) Investigating aerosol-induced cloud nucleation and its effects on the hydrological cycle. South America faces critical atmospheric challenges with global consequences. Limited infrastructure and monitoring networks hinder accurate data collection and climate modeling, weakening public policies and international cooperation. AERIS addresses these challenges by integrating high-quality, vertically resolved atmospheric data with near-surface imagery, advancing aerosol characterization in South America. This unique database will strengthen regional and global atmospheric science. To achieve these goals, AERIS includes an ambitious consortium and proposes secondments, workshops, and training activities to foster a shared culture of research and innovation.

Ice shelves fringing the Antarctic coastline limit sea-level rise by slowing down the flow of grounded ice into the sea. They are thinning because of warming and intensifying ocean currents. Building upon my expertise in multi-scale flow dynamics and subglacial oceanography, I will resolve the two main bottlenecks that impair our ability to assess and project the state of Antarctic ice shelves. These are: (i) a poor understanding of the relationship between ice-shelf ablation rates and ocean properties & (ii) the high computational cost of ocean simulations. I will first build new models of the metre-thick ice-shelf—ocean boundary layer (ISOBL), using innovative laboratory experiments and simulations that will unravel its dynamics. The lack of accurate ISOBL models is responsible for leading-order errors in predicting ice loss rates and freshwater production. The new models will capture how turbulence controls heat fluxes over an unprecedented range of sub ice-shelf conditions, accurately predicting ice ablation rates from the grounding line to the shelf front. I will then promote a paradigm shift in the modelling of oceans beneath ice shelves, which are hundreds of kilometres wide. At present, ensemble simulations of ice-shelf ocean cavities on 100-year time scales are about 1000 times computationally too costly to resolve mesoscales, which influence the mean circulation and ice ablation. To circumvent this issue, I will train novel data-driven reduced-order models (ROMs), which will emulate the ocean dynamics at high resolution and unprecedently low computational cost. The ROMs will learn the key fingerprints of ocean cavities and their time evolution from short-term high-resolution simulations. They will then be extended to longer times and different forcing conditions, enabling eddy-resolving IPCC-level large ensemble simulations of subglacial oceans, which will help reduce uncertainty related to the timing of abrupt regime changes of the Antarctic ice sheet.

The Martian missions have gradually revealed that Mars abounds with evidence of a full ancient hydrological system favourable to life emergence. If so, there is every reasons to believe that Mars has hosted a hemispheric ocean covering the northern lowlands. This hypothesis is as old as Mars exploration, but has been repeatedly challenged over the past two decades. The case of primitive Martian ocean remains one of the planet’s most controversial and unsolved issue. Recent discoveries are re-opening this question mainly highlighting that the main oceanic activity may be older than we thought with related deposits partly exhumed and two rovers (Mars2020/NASA arrived in 2021 and ExoMars/ESA-Roskosmos to be launched in 2022) have landing sites in the oldest terrains never explored on Mars, displaying sediments possibly linked with an ocean system. To wind up the debate, the identification of ancient deposits of the same age, same composition with a global distribution in agreement with a possible ocean level is required. But such clues are small scale exposures solved only by high-resolution orbital data set (>10 To of data) or by in situ exploration preventing a forward link to the global context. Oceanid proposes to face this challenge by investigating at different scale: global, mesoscale and microscale using complementary dataset (orbital, in situ and experimental data). Oceanid will also lie on innovative methodology of orbital data mining: geological object recognition by artificial intelligence, erosion/deposition evolution models, clustering from multi-type of data… Oceanid objectives are to describe the early Martian sedimentary record accumulated below possible global ocean levels, to establish a fine-scale chronology of primitive events, to contextualize Mars2020 and ExoMars missions within the global ancient hydrological system and to correlate the oceanic context, the transient water cycle, and the mineralogy observed both from orbit and in situ.

Recent evidence of increasing accumulation of micro- and nanoplastics (MnP) in soils and groundwater raise severe concerns by agricultural and water industries, food manufacturers, regulators, environmental interest groups and citizens. Private and public sectors require detailed understanding of environmental and public health risks posed by MnP in soils and groundwater. The PlasticUnderground Doctoral Network creates supra-disciplinary intersectoral capacity for analysing the fate, transport and impacts of MnP in soils and groundwater to develop solutions for reducing their environmental and public health risks, supporting the EC’s circular plastic economy strategy. The central aim of the PlasticUnderground Doctoral Network is to deliver international scientific excellence through a holistic supra-disciplinary and inter-sectoral research and training network on solutions to the emerging crisis of MnP pollution in subsurface ecosystems in soils and groundwater, integrating knowledge across traditional discipline boundaries to benefit the public and private sectors. The supra-disciplinary research programme includes unique training opportunities for a cohort of 10 Doctoral Candidates (DCs) (plus one individually funded through ETHZ [CH] and three funded through UoB, RU and Polymateria [UKRI] as Associated Partners) in environmental and social science, ecotoxicology, soil science and aquatic ecology, analytical chemistry, agronomy, data science and numerical modelling as well as responsible innovation, method standardization for use in regulatory decision making and risk assessment. The integrated training programme will prepare DCs with skill sets that are urgently required in agricultural, water, chemical, and manufacturing industries, environmental and regulatory agencies, academia, and the public sector and includes training provision by key stakeholders that will directly benefit from the training in this network.