UniRESEARCH (Norway)

Uni Research AS is a non-profit research company in which the University of Bergen (UiB) owns 85% of the shares. Uni Research is the University of Bergen’s strategic research partner, and carries out research projects in all the university’s discipline areas.

The company operates on a non-profit basis, and any profits made will be reinvested in its activities. Advanced scientific equipment and modern laboratory facilities are used in cooperation with the University of Bergen. Uni Research has nine departments. The department Uni Bjerknes Centre runs the climate research through the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research (BCCR). The BCCR is a National Centre of Excellence funded by the Research Council of Norway for the period 2003-2012, and is the largest scientific climate research centre in Scandinavia. From 2011 the Government has awarded the centre a long-term contribution to secure the competence of the centre as the key national centre for studies of the climate system.

The BCCR is an international leader in high latitude climate research, and a key institution for information on climate change for politicians, industry and the public. The BCCR has a leading research position within climate understanding of the past present and future, in climate modelling and scenarios for future climate changes as well as quantification of climate changes. The BCCR was one of the four modelling groups in Europe that provided model simulations to the IPCC 4th AR.

The BCCR leads the Norwegian activities for developing climate models / earth system models (NorESM) in advance of the next IPCC report. Uni ResearchAS (UniRESEARCH) will bring to NeXOS its expertise in operating long-term fix-point observatories for monitoring of Ocean Essential Environmental Variables in key positions in the North Atlantic/Arctic and in Antarctica.

The observatories include:

  • The longest existing oceanographic time-series in Antarctica, the OCEANSITES S2 observatory in the southern Weddell Sea
  • The world longest existing time-series from the deep oceans, the station M in the Norwegian Sea

In addition to a have PI responsibility for a number of observatories on the Greenland-Scotland Ridge to monitor the exchanges between the North Atlantic and Arctic.