NORCE – Norwegian Research Centre AS is one of Norway's largest independent research institutes. With its subsidiaries, NORCE has over 1000 employees, and its turnover is over NOK 1.3 billion. The largest stakeholders in NORCE are the Universities of Bergen, Stavanger,  Agder and Tromsø. NORCE's main office is in Bergen, but is spread over Norway.

NORCE delivers research and innovation in energy, health care, climate, the environment, society and technology. As one of Norway's leading research institutes for both ICT and Earth Observation it has built a unique expertise in the cross-section between these two disciplines.  The Earth Observation scientist of NORCE (mainly from formerly known Norut - Northern Research Institute) consists of approx. 20 scientists and the main activities are synthetic aperture radar processing and applications. NORCE is a leading institute in developing prototype operational SAR monitoring systems for forest, land cover, snow cover, avalanche detection, flood, sea ice, ocean and geohazard monitoring. In 2001, NORCE (then Norut) was appointed as an ESA Expert Support Laboratory for the Envisat mission by the European Space Agency and is currently a contracted partner in the Sentinel-1 Mission Performance Centre - Expert Support Laboratory program. NORCE has participated in many large-scale application-oriented projects. During the last decade, the institute has developed an extensive general-purpose prototyping framework for SAR processing, called GSAR, the backbone of our operational monitoring systems for several applications. Since 2009, Norut/NORCE has been strongly involved in land cover monitoring projects related to REDD in tropical countries through EU FP7, ESA and bilateral project and the Global Forest Observation Initiative (GFOI). The social science department (NORCE Society) conduct research on culture and society which provides a foundation for decision-making by politicians, the authorities and the business sector in relation to key arenas of society. Researchers from NORCE Society collaborated with Jagiellonian University in Krakow,  Centre for Intercultural Relations in Warsaw, and NOVA in the EEA Grants Poland project TRANSFAM Doing Families in a Transnational Context, funded by a Norwegian grant within the Core 2012 Call of the Polish Norwegian Research Cooperation with awards made by the National Centre for Research and Development. Between 2015 and 2018, researchers from NORCE Society followed the developments around the refugee camps on Lesvos, analysing the process and the relationships between the various stakeholders who were involved in the refugee crisis. This involved building extensive networks with stakeholders and refugees, as well as organizing workshops to facilitate co-creation among stakeholders.

Jörg Haarpaintner Senior remote sensing research scientist with 20 years of experience (Google scholar i10-index: 14). His research focus is on the application of satellite-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) for operational monitoring. Jörg started his research career in polar research during PhD at the Norwegian Polar Institute and then at the national ice services in the US and Norway. Currently, he is focusing on the terrestrial application of SAR, specifically on forest, land cover and change monitoring with a strong interest in sustainable development. He has been involved in several projects on tropical regions in regard to REDD (Reduce Emission of Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and in GEO’s Global Forest Observation Initiative (GFOI), leading the SAR processing, analysis and the service delivery to users in Africa and South-America in EU and ESA projects. Through this he has gained considerable experience in cooperating with developing countries. He isalso a member of the Copernicus ROSE-L Mission Advisory Group and the working group on Copernicus SAR Radiometric Enhanced Product, administered by the European Space Agency (ESA).

Astrid Espergen

Eugene Guribye