PEEX Preview

The vision of Pan-Eurasian EXperiment (PEEX) is to solve interlinked global challenges influencing the human wellbeing and societies in northern Eurasia, such as climate change, air quality, biodiversity loss, chemicalisation, food supply, energy production and fresh water in integrative ways recognising the increasing important role of the arctic and northern boreal ecosystems. The PEEX vision includes to establish and to maintain a long-term coherent and co-ordinated research activity and research and educational infrastructure in PEEX domain.

PEEX will use an integrated observational and modelling framework to identify different forcing and feedback mechanisms in the northern parts of the Earth system, and therefore enable more reliable predictions of future regional and global climate. Due to the already seen impacts of climate change on the society and the specific role of permafrost and boreal forest regions this context, the PEEX initiative emphasises the fast actions needed for establishing PEEX domain, the next generation research infrastructure in the field of boreal and arctic research. PEEX is targeted to provide fast track assessments for the climate policy making in a global scale and mitigation strategies for the northern pan-Eurasian region. PEEX is built on collaboration by EU, Russian and Chinese parties, involving scientists from various disciplines, experimentalists and modellers, and international research projects funded by European, Russian and Chinese funding programmes.

PEEX is planned to be active starting from 2013-2014 in a continuous manner establishing a long-term research infrastructure (RI) in the northern pan-Eurasian area. The PEEX domain covers the Eurasian boreal forest zone and arctic permafrost regions of the northern hemisphere including marine areas such as the Baltic and North seas and the Arctic Ocean. The PEEX research agenda is focused on the process understanding of water/energy and the biogeochemical cycles. The research agenda provides improved conceptual understanding over the relevant spatial and temporal scales and processes from nano to global scale. New knowledge at process level in all scales, from nano to global, is implemented into Earth system models at the global scale.

The future PEEX RI is supporting and complementing aircraft and satellite observations and has the important role in validation, integration, full exploitation of remote sensing data. The strategic focus is to ensure the long-term continuation of advanced measurements in land-atmosphere-ocean continuum in the northern Eurasian area.

PEEX’s scientific outcome is exploited via new climate scenarios in global and regional scales. PEEX will also address and provide mitigation plans for the air quality problematics (emission sources, long-term transport) and natural hazards and land use under changing climate. PEEX aims to contribute to the Earth system science agenda and climate policy for topics inherent to the pan-Eurasian environment and provide mitigation assessment of northern pan-Eurasian societies to cope with climate change.

Preparatory Phase Committee: