Mathilde Bøttger Sørensen

EPOS-Norway – Research Infrastructure for Geohazards (EPOS-NG)

Mathilde Bøttger Sørensen

The EPOS-Norway – Research Infrastructure for Geohazards (EPOS-NG) will be established, starting from early 2025, with funding from the Research Council of Norway’s Infrastructure program. EPOS-NG aims to be the go-to infrastructure for research on geohazards in Norway (i.e., landslides, tsunamis, earthquakes, and cryospheric hazards). Complementary to EPOS ERIC and building on research infrastructure developed during EPOS-Norway (EPOS-N) phase 1, EPOS-NG will establish new pools of instruments that are easily accessible to all geoscientists in Norway. We will develop an enhanced and extended state-of-the-art data portal to provide nationwide access to a range of geoscience data as well as computational and visualisation services. The EPOS-NG instrument pools include rapid-deployable seismometers, ocean bottom seismographs, Distributed Acoustic Sensing and Distributed Temperature and Strain Sensing instrumentation, Transient Electromagnetic measurement capacity, piezometers, self-potential sensors and ground-based interferometric radar systems. The new instruments will facilitate research on a wide range of processes including seismicity, slope stability and landslides, groundwater and soil conditions, permafrost and cryospheric processes. Combined with new services for tsunami hazard assessment, as well as novel datasets on InSAR displacement trends and historical and palaeoseismological events, new links can be established through comprehensive, multidisciplinary studies. Effective data integration and visualisation will be achieved via the EPOS-N portal, which was developed in EPOS-N phase 1 and will be substantially enhanced in close dialogue with the users in EPOS-NG. The portal combines data from distributed monitoring networks, innovative services for advanced data analysis and national databases within geosciences into a single national e-infrastructure, following FAIR principles. EPOS-NG thus represents a unifying nationwide research infrastructure, including all the relevant physical infrastructures and providing a national hub for solid Earth science data and services. In this presentation, I will present the plans for EPOS-NG and describe how the community can be involved in and benefit from the activities.