OUR OFFICES

The AIR Centre has multiple national and regional offices.

Headquarters and Central Office | Portugal

Headquarters

AIR Centre Terceira, Azores

Central Office

AIR Centre Lisbon

National and Regional Offfices

BRAZIL

LAMCE/COPPE – UFRJ, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro.

Focus

Weather and Ocean Monitoring

Selected Projects

LAMCE UFRJ is an Associated Partner in the Atlantic Nexus proposal, submitted in response to FCT’s call for R&D Projects on the Occasion of the Celebrations of the V Centenary of the Circumnavigation Voyage.
LAMCE signed a letter of support for proposal SNOB-5G: Scalable Network Backhauling for 5G project, in response to the Portugal 2020 topic “SI I&DT Projectos em Co-Promoção – Parcerias Internacionais” (04/SI/2019), confirming its availability to facilitate the implementation of in-situ demonstrations of the technologies developed within the project.
LAMCE UFRJ just open the registration for a 10-hour AIR Centre Applied Course: Introduction to Regional Ocean Modelling. Webinar scheduled for the second week of August, 2019.
Weather / Ocean Integrated Platform for Observing and Monitoring the Guanabara Bay, project developed by LAMCE and funded by FAPERJ.
MARCHANGE – Marine Protected Areas Framework. Development of assimilative numerical models for quantifying the value of ecosystem services, human impacts and social benefits by comparing Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) with different governance structures, distinctive biodiversity, specific environmental constraints and human exploitation.
INPE agreed to jointly discuss and analyze the feasibility of deployment of an Atlantic Constellation of nano/micro satellites in concert with space agencies from other Atlantic countries for providing innovative Earth Observation data, services, and products.

Recent activities

August 9, 2019 › Workshop, meeting with FIOCRUZ. Inauguration of AIR Centre | Rio de Janeiro at UFRJ Technology Park.

Contact

Luiz Landau

IGEO-UFBA, Federal Unversity of Bahia, Salvador, Bahia.

Focus

Coastal processes and biodiversity

Selected Projects

MARCHANGE – Marine Protected Areas Framework. Development of assimilative numerical models for quantifying the value of ecosystem services, human impacts and social benefits by comparing Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) with different governance structures, distinctive biodiversity, specific environmental constraints and human exploitation.
INPE agreed to jointly discuss and analyze the feasibility of deployment of an Atlantic Constellation of nano/micro satellites in concert with space agencies from other Atlantic countries for providing innovative Earth Observation data, services, and products.

Recent Activities

Salvador (August 14-15, 2019) Workshop. Inauguration of AIR Centre | Bahia at IGEO UFBA.

Contact

Olivia Oliveira

LABOMAR, Fortaleza, Ceará.

Focus

Marine Spatial Planning

Selected Projects

MARCHANGE – Marine Protected Areas Framework. Development of assimilative numerical models for quantifying the value of ecosystem services, human impacts and social benefits by comparing Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) with different governance structures, distinctive biodiversity, specific environmental constraints and human exploitation.
INPE agreed to jointly discuss and analyze the feasibility of deployment of an Atlantic Constellation of nano/micro satellites in concert with space agencies from other Atlantic countries for providing innovative Earth Observation data, services, and products.

Recent Activities

Ceará (August 6-7, 2019): Meetings in Fortaleza with SECITECE, LABOMAR, FUNCEME, GDAe UFC, IDESCO. Inauguration of AIR Centre | Ceará at UECE.
Inácio Arruda, Secretary of Science, Technology and Higher Education of the State of Ceará recently met, in Lisbon, Helena Pereira, President of FCT, and Mafalda Dorado, Director of ANI National Innovation Agency, to discuss, respectively, funding programmes (mobility of researchers and a 2nd call for Ceará / Portugal R&D projects) and reciprocal promotion of high tech firms.

Contact

TBD

NIGERIA

NASDRA, Abuja

Nigeria, mainly through the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology (FMST), has actively participated in all of AIR Centre High-level Dialogues and meetings and it was the very first country to set up a national centre, which is hosted by the National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA) and participated by several other research institutions such as the Nigerian Institute for Oceanography and Marine Research (NIOMR), the Federal Institute of Industrial Research, Oshodi (FIIRO), the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI), the Nigerian Hydrological Services Agency (NIHSA) and the Nigerian Natural Medicine Development Agency (NNMDA), among others. FMST hosted the 5th High-Level Dialogue in Lagos, on April 28-30 and NASDRA led the signing of the Letter of Intent for a joint framework to promote innovation, entrepreneurship and capacity building in the new space sector through the deployment of an All-Atlantic Nanosatellite Constellation.

Focus

Food security
Flood Monitoring and Coastal Resilience
Marine Aquaculture (offshore, onshore)
IUU Fishing
Space technologies

Selected Projects

Use of Earth Observation for Flood / Drought Early Warning Systems and its effects of the Atlantic Ocean on land surfaces and water bodies developed in cooperation with NASRDA, NIHSA and the Nigerian Centre For Dryland Agriculture (CDA).
Fisheries Stock Management Plan and Harmonisation of the Fishing Governance Structures in Nigeria, led by Parcy Ochuko Obatola, NIOMR. The objective of the project is to determine the current status of the pelagic fishery resources and the development of stock and environmental management plans for both artisanal and industrial fisheries in Nigeria (in response to the 2nd Call for Joint Project Proposals, Initiative Knowledge for Development, Programme for Cooperation in Science & Technology between MCTES and the Ismaili Imamat).
Acquisition of oceanographic data for sustainable resources management in the Gulf of Guinea, led by Nubi Olubunmi Ayoola, NIOMR. The project aims to obtain data on deep-water characteristics of Nigerian territorial waters up to the 2,000 m isobath. This will provide information for a qualitative description of the water column and sediment characteristics (in response to the 2nd Call for Joint Project Proposals, Initiative Knowledge for Development, Programme for Cooperation in Science & Technology between MCTES and the Ismaili Imamat).

Recent activities:

The AIR Centre | Nigeria held a consultative workshop on April 15, 2019, to introduce the AIR Centre and to engage with relevant stakeholders (academia, local governments, armed forces, NGOs, and private citizens). The main interests identified were:

Determining suitable sites for fish cage culture using physical (e.g. bathymetric, temperature) data and chemical (e.g. salinity) data (NIOMR)
Using fish tracking technology to identify fish population sites in the aquatic environment. (West African Science Service Center on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use – WASCAL)
Deep-Sea Exploration (Federal University of Technology, Minna – FUTMINNA)
Investigating the system dynamics between land, climate, and oceans, Research in coastal evolution and dynamics (The Federal University of Technology Akure – FUTA)
Sustainable Aquaculture (FUTMINNA)
Marine Biotechnology (FUTMINNA)
Bathymetric Studies of water bodies (NIHSA)
Air Quality Monitoring and Modelling (University of Lagos – UNILAG)
Sourcing fodder for drylands domesticated animals from marine vegetation (National Animal Production Research Institute – NAPRI)
Augmenting fish meal in animal diets with seaweeds as feed (Bayero University, Kano – BUK)
Land Subsidence, Coastal Deformation and Mean Sea Level Monitoring (Centre for Geodesy and Geodynamics Toro – CGG-TORO)

Contact

Asma Ibrahim

SPAIN

AIR Centre Spain | PLOCAN, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands

The Spanish Government is strongly committed to promote a R&D agenda on Atlantic Interaction through the AIR Centre and has designated the Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands (PLOCAN) to be their representative in the AD AIR Centre since November 2018.

The AIR Centre | Spain is coordinated by PLOCAN and it is constituted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Center for Energy, Environment and Technology (CIEMAT), Center for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI), Superior Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), EIT – Climate-KIC Spain, Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute (IAC), and the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO). Other institutions are expected to join the node. Spain hosted the 4th High-Level Industry-Science-Government Dialogue on Atlantic Interactions in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria on November 25th-27th, 2018, where the Canary Islands Declaration was signed.

Focus

Marine Robotics
Marine Aquaculture
Earth Observation and Space Technologies
Biodiversity

Selected Projects

Spain and Portugal are working together with other countries – European, African and Latin American – to submit several proposals for INTERREG and EU H2020 funding calls such as INTERREG-MAC 2014-2020 MAC2 EJE which aims the strengthening of RI infrastructures and capacity building initiatives in the region. The proposal is led by Baltasar Peñate Suárez, Instituto Tecnologico De Canarias (ITC).
Feasibility study for a High-Altitude Pseudo-Satellite (HAPS), which is an aircraft operating in the high atmosphere in order to provide high availability and proximity services such as Earth observation and telecommunications that can complement and enhance existing satellite-based services.
The AIR Centre signed an MoU with the E-Science European Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research – LifeWatch ERIC to develop joint initiatives and projects of relevance for the activity areas of Life Watch ERIC, namely:
- A system of marine and coastal, atmospheric and freshwater observatories;
- Common access to distributed data and knowledge bases from monitoring sites and observatories;
- Virtual Research Environments-VRE, as well the co-development of other complementary ICT-based tools (e.g., Big Data, Blockchain, Remote Sensing’), to provide the required services and tools to support advanced scientific work in key biodiversity and ecosystem research topics;
- Decision-support applications demanded by environmental managers and other stakeholders to address issues on policies and strategies of governments as well as private companies;

UNITED KINGDOM

Satellite Applications CATAPULT, Didcot

UK has followed the development of the AIR Centre with great interest and it is in the final stages of negotiating its participation in the AD AIR Centre.

UNITED STATES

Penn State

OUR NODES

The AIR Centre network encompasses multiple nodes spread throughout the Atlantic region.

ANGOLA

INIP, Luanda

AIR Centre Angola

The AIR Centre is recognized by the Angolan Government as an indispensable scientific network to align national priorities and global challenges and to improve local capacity in sevceral scientific domains. The AIR Centre is assumed as a powerful ‘engine’ to boost the development of scientific consortiums for proposal submissions to EC funded R&D projects, among others. Angola is expected to join AD AIR Centre by the end of 2019.

The Angolan Ministry of Higher Education, Science Technology and Innovation is in process of consulting several research institutes to decide which of them will host the AIR Centre | Angola, where the National Institute of Fisheries Research (INIP) and the Botanical Center at the University Agostinho Neto (UAN) are expected to play an important role.

Focus

Sharing of research infrastructures (RV Baia Farta Fishery and Oceanographic Research Vessel)
Marine Aquaculture (onshore and offshore)
Use of Earth observation for monitoring of mangroves
Use of Earth observation for monitoring of vector-borne tropical diseases (Malaria, Dengue Fever, Yellow Fever, Chikungunya, Zika, others)

Selected Project

Monitoring of Mangroves for understanding meaningful forest cover attributes to evaluate carbon sequestration potential and protective role of mangrove forests for climate change adaptation and mitigation using both optical and radar satellite data at various spatial resolutions (in response to the 2nd Call for Joint Project Proposals, Initiative Knowledge for Development, Programme for Cooperation in Science & Technology between MCTES and the Ismaili Imamat).

CONTACT

Filomena Vaz Velho

BRAZIL

São Paulo, São Paulo

Florianopolis, Santa Catarina

Rio Grande do Sul

CAPE VERDE

INDP / OSCM, Mindelo, Sao Vicente

AIR Centre Cape Verde

There is a high level of government commitment towards the AIR Centre, from early days, having signed all of the three High-Level Declarations. The AIR Centre is seen as a mechanism that will foster Cape Verde as a player in the international scientific stage, ensuring the national priorities. It is also seen as a way to foster local capacity building. On November 23rd, 2018, Ministers Maritza Rosabal and Manuel Heitor and Minister signed a Letter of Intent between Portugal and Cape Verde to foster the implementation of Atlantic Interaction’s Agenda through the AIR Centre and become associated to the AD AIR Centre. The AIR Centre | Cape Verde will be the Campus do Mar, which will be the result of the soon to be concluded merger between Ocean Science Centre Mindelo INDP (National Institute for Fisheries Development) and UniCV Mindelo (Cape Verde University in Mindelo). Cape Verde hosted the 3rd High Level Dialogue in Praia, Santiago Island, May 7th-8th, 2018, where the Praia Declaration was signed.

Focus

Coastal bathymetry
Marine Aquaculture
IUU Fishing

Selected Projects

The Polytechnic Institute of Bragança, Portugal and the University of Cape Verde joined forces to create the Mountain Research Centre-Cape Verde (CIMO-CV) on November 23rd, 2018, which will be dedicated to research and innovation on agri-food supply chains, including seafood supply chains to leverage local expertise from fishing and aquaculture harvesting to processing, marketing and distribution.
PlastIDe – Ocean Plastic Debris Mapping and Identification, led by Diana Viegas, INESCTEC, in response to the FCT call R&D Projects on the Occasion of the Celebrations of the V Centenary of the Circumnavigation Voyage – 2019 (CIRCNA/OCT/0292/2019).
AtlanticNEXUS – Upscaling local numerical models into global models and improving it for subsequent downscaling is the goal of this initiative. The two objectives are to promote bilateral cooperation between Portugal and other Atlantic countries through knowledge sharing and promote global cooperation through upscaling of local solutions into regional and global scales, led by Ramiro Neves, MARETEC / IST, in response to the FCT call R&D Projects on the Occasion of the Celebrations of the V Centenary of the Circumnavigation Voyage – 2019 (CIRCNA/OCT/0292/2019).

Recent activities

Several AIR Centre meetings and workshops were already held in Cape Verde. The most recent one was the Workshop on “Ocean and Coastal Information in Support of Marine Resources and Biodiversity in the Macaronesia and Sao Tome and Principe region” on March 14-15, 2019, at INDP. The main objective of this workshop was to inform local and regional stakeholders about the technology and methods for deriving ocean and coastal information for use in sustainable fisheries management, aquaculture site selection and maritime spatial planning and biodiversity monitoring. The outcome of this workshop will support the development of a Coastal Information Data Cube, which will generate Analysis Ready Data (ARD) for policy making from satellite imagery and in situ observations. The Data Cube will be focusing on identifying trends in regional or global climate or environmental processes that may be driving local change in blue economy.

Contact

Osvaldina Silva

GHANA

DFMS University of Ghana, Legon, Accra

AIR Centre Ghana

The AIR Centre is under negotiations to implement the Air Centre |Ghana at the Department of Marine and Fisheries Sciences (MAFS) at the University of Ghana (UG). DMFR leads the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Coastal & Marine Resources Management Centre and the Monitoring for Environment and Security in Africa (MESA), which is a project funded by the European Union, implemented with the overall coordination of the African Union Commission (AUC) and steered by the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and Regional Intergovernmental Organizations, such as Economic Commission of West African States (ECOWAS), in cooperation with several partner institutions including the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Services (EUMETSAT) and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission. Several other institutions will participate in the Air Centre |Ghana, namely Centre for Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Services (CERSGIS), Ghana Statistical Service, Space Systems Technology Lab / All Nations University College, D:Lab / Ashesi University and Namibia Institute of Space Technology (NIST) at the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST)

Focus

Earth observation for combating IUU fishing
Offshore aquaculture site selection
Nanosatellite technologies

Selected Projects

MAFS is a key strategic stakeholder in the NextAtlantic (Next Generation of Atlantic Earth Observation Services) consortium, which was created in response to the H2020 Call DT-SPACE-06-EO-2019-Leadership in Enabling and Industrial Technologies – Space, under the topic International Cooperation Copernicus – Designing EO downstream applications with international partners.
Development of a mangrove inventory and characterization workflow with tools to map mangrove extent and structure (e.g. density, or biomass), as well as the general land cover and land use of the project area based on the ESA Sentinel-1 and 2 satellite images. The mangrove extent and land use maps will be derived with supervised machine learning algorithms (support vector machine and random forest) that uses training data to establish the relationship between the mangrove classes and the satellite images, led in Ghana by Foster Mensah, CERSGIS (in response to the 2nd Call for Joint Project Proposals, Initiative Knowledge for Development, Programme for Cooperation in Science & Technology between MCTES and the Ismaili Imamat).
Earth observations in support of fisheries management in West Africa using marine EO data for mapping potential fishing zones, issuing early warning of ocean conditions, monitoring fishing vessel traffic with the objective of improving the operational conditions of small fishing vessels in the Gulf of Guinea. The project is led in Ghana by Kwame Adu Agyekum, MFAS (in response to the 2nd Call for Joint Project Proposals, Initiative Knowledge for Development, Programme for Cooperation in Science & Technology between MCTES and the Ismaili Imamat).

Recent Activities

Workshop on Design Innovation for Coastal Resilience – The two-day workshop main objective was to test the feasibility of building local low-cost sensors for implementing Citizen’s Science projects. The first day, at Ashesi University, was focused in applying design thinking methodologies to scoping the Agbogbloshie Scrapyard Problem Space and assemble and test solar-powered sensors for temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, altitude and air quality over an Arduino platform. The second day, at Agbogbloshie Scrapyard, was dedicated to understanding on site the complex e-waste recycling supply chains, mobilizing local workers and reading environmental data related to burning insulated wires to recycle copper. In total, 32 people participated in the workshop that demonstrated that low-cost sensors could be built by undergraduate students and used to collect reliable environmental data.

Contact

TBD

NAMIBIA

UNAM/SANUMARC

AIR Centre Namibia

The AIR Centre is under negotiations to implement the Air Centre |Namibia at the Sam Nujoma Marine and Coastal Resources Research Centre (SANUMARC), which is a full-fledged multidisciplinary research centre of the University of Namibia (UNAM) with the mandate to promote research and development activities in the field of Marine Science and Coastal Resources.

Focus

Earth observation services for combating IUU fishing and illegal ballast water discharge
Offshore aquaculture site selection
Nanosatellite technologies

Selected Project

SANUMARC is a key strategic stakeholder in the NextAtlantic (Next Generation of Atlantic Earth Observation Services) consortium, which was created in response to the H2020 Call DT-SPACE-06-EO-2019-Leadership in Enabling and Industrial Technologies – Space, under the topic International Cooperation Copernicus – Designing EO downstream applications with international partners.

Recent Activities

On March 1st, 2019, the Air Centre met the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Higher Education, Alfred van Kent, in Windhoek, to present the AIR Centre and discuss opportunities for collaboration with the Namibian research community. In this meeting, several relevant Namibian research institutions, notably the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST), the National Commission on Research, Science and Technology (NCRST) and the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources (MFMR), expressed their willingness to explore potential collaboration in the areas of nanosatellite technologies, Earth observation services for combating illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing and offshore aquaculture site selection.

Contact

TBD

PORTUGAL

+ATLANTIC CoLAB, Lisbon

Portuguese Collaborative Laboratory for the Atlantic

+ATLANTIC is a Portuguese not-for-profit R&D+I institution that began its activity in 2019 and develops added-value projects and services related to various fields of marine science, ocean technology, blue economy, marine ecosystem’s health, climate change, ocean literacy, and science communication. The main tools employed by +ATLANTIC’s multidisciplinary team of 50+ collaborators are numerical modelling, remote sensing, data science, artificial intelligence, and space technology.

Colab DTx, Guimarães

SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE

Sao Tome and Principe

AIR Centre Sao Tome and Principe

The Ministry of Education and Higher Education is in process of establishing the AIR Centre | Sao Tome and Principe office at the Department of Physics of the University of Sao Tome and Principe (USTP) together with the creation the Mountain Research Centre – Sao Tome and Principe (CIMO-STP), which will be dedicated to research and innovation on seafood supply chains to leverage local expertise from fishing and aquaculture harvesting to processing, marketing and distribution. The AIR Centre | Sao Tome and Principe will also include the National Center for Endemic Diseases (CNE), the National Institute of Statistics (INE), the National Meteorological Institute (INM), the Department of Fisheries at the Ministry of Agriculture, Rural Development and Fisheries and Agronomic and Technical Industrial Research Center (CIAT), and several ONGs.

Focus

Coastal bathymetry
Marine Aquaculture
Food security with precision agriculture
Use of Earth observation for monitoring of forest coverage
Use of Earth observation for monitoring of vector-borne tropical diseases (Malaria, Dengue Fever, Yellow Fever, Chikungunya, Zika, others)

Selected Project

Use of Earth Observation for monitoring of vector-borne tropical diseases (Malaria, Dengue Fever, Yellow Fever, Chikungunya, Zika, others) including forecasting of the effects of climate change in the future distribution of mosquitoes (in response to the 2nd Call for Joint Project Proposals, Initiative Knowledge for Development, Programme for Cooperation in Science & Technology.

SOUTH AFRICA

Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Cape Town

AIR Centre South Africa

South Arica, through the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and other South African representatives such as the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), has actively participated in all of AIR Centre High-level Dialogues and meetings, since June 2016 (NYC, USA). CSIR organized a very successful AIR Centre Consultative Workshop at the Cape Town Satellite Campus, on September 13th-14th, 2018, which established first order collaborative priorities for AIR Centre activities from a regional Southern African and Brazilian perspective, under the guidance of the South-South Framework.

Stewart Bernard, Senior Scientist at CSIR, is the leader of the AIR Centre Working Group on Earth Observation “Systems Integration: From Deep Sea to Near Space”. After the workshop in the 4th High-Level Dialogue held on November 2018 in the Canary Islands, this Working Group produced a Vision Paper, which set the background for the effective development of the future AIR Centre Earth Observation Node in the Azores.

AIR Centre activities in South Africa concentrate on implementing the AIR Centre | South Africa, which will be a diversified national network coordinated by CSIR and will include South African National Space Agency (SANSA) for space science, the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) for advanced computing and the South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON) for Biodiversity.

Focus

Earth Observation and Space Technologies
Marine litter
Marine robotics

Selected Projects

South Africa has substantial ongoing capability and investment in Blue Economy focused EO operational services, through the DEA/CSIR OCIMS project nationally under the Phakisa Oceans Economy policy framework, and the GMES-Africa marcoSOUTH project regionally. As a result, CSIR is an active participant in the NextAtlantic (Next Generation of Atlantic Earth Observation Services) consortium, which was created in response to the H2020 Call DT-SPACE-06-EO-2019-Leadership in Enabling and Industrial Technologies – Space, under the topic International Cooperation Copernicus – Designing EO downstream applications with international partners. If approved, NextAtlantic will put together a set of midstream and downstream EO services for sustainable fisheries management and compliance, empowering aquaculture development and operations, monitoring and analysis of Marine and Coastal Systems and supporting the sustainable exploitation of offshore energy resources. NextAtlantic will greatly strengthen existing Southern African operational services for Africa’s Atlantic coast by maximising the value of European EO & Research Infrastructure, and provide a mechanism for South African EO expertise to feedback into the European Copernicus programme.
Contacts have been established with SANSA to assess the feasibility to deploy an All-Atlantic CubeSat Constellation in cooperation with Brazil, Nigeria, Portugal, Spain and other potential countries. This will build upon the SA collaborative commitment to develop and launch a constellation of eight Maritime Domain Awareness Cubesats through a DST/CPUT/CSIR/SANSA collaboration.

UNITED STATES

University of North Carolina in Charlotte

AIR UNC Charlotte

UNC Charlotte will organize a workshop in September 15, 2019, to start formal negotiations to set up AIR Centre | UNC Charlotte, focusing on Renewable Energies.