Dear Colleagues
(apologies for any cross-posting)
As some of you may know, NERC is currently undertaking an exercise to gather ideas for new capital investments, and is canvassing for suggestions from the community. This is an ongoing process, so ideas can in principle be submitted at
any time, but there is a submission deadline of May 12th for ideas to be considered at the first meeting of NERC’s new Joint Capital Advisory Group, which should happen sometime during the summer.
It’s important to stress that, at this stage, this process is simply part of a prioritisation exercise. No new funding has been allocated, but the idea is that NERC should have a list of potential capital projects ready to go, should capital
funding appear after a post-election spending review.
Information about the process can be found at:
http://www.nerc.ac.uk/funding/available/capital/ideas/
Submissions should be made at institutional level and, for the May 12th deadline, there is a limit of three proposals per institute. Details can be found on the web page above, but each of your institutions should presumably have set up
some kind of process for deciding on its institutional priorities.
I have been talking to some of you about the fact that I am intending to submit a bid for NERC capital investment in EISCAT_3D into this exercise, at the £10M-£15M level. I am allowed to submit a bid directly, since EISCAT is part of the
NERC Services and Facilities portfolio. A few people have expressed interest in trying to support this bid via their own institutional responses. For those of you who wish to do so, I am attaching a draft of the information which I am intending to submit,
using the standard form which NERC requires for the process. Feel free to suggest comments and suggestions for improvement!
I’m not sure where this process will lead, but it seems to be important to at least put down a marker at this stage. If you wish to support this bid for EISCAT_3D investment, please let me know. I think it would be best not to simply
copy the attached, but to use it as a basis to which you could add your own institutional flavour.
With best regards
Ian