ESA'S Climate Change Initiative: How SMOS Contributes

Abstract

The European Space Agency (ESA) leads on observing the Earth's changing climate from space. Its flagship programme, the Climate Change Initiative (CCI), draws together over 40 years of data from ESA's own satellite missions and those from other space agencies - from past as well as currently active in -orbit ins trumentation. The CCI science teams focus on R&D activities to generate long -term, global climate data records that describe the evolution of key components of the Earth's climate system, as defined by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) (see https://public.wmo.int/en/programmes/global-climate-observing-system) in support of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (see https://unfccc.int/). Currently more than 20 Essential Climate Variables (ECV) of the 54 GCOS defined ECVs have been addressed by science teams involved in the CCI. All ECV datasets are fully validated and have high levels of traceability and consistency, including quantitative estimates of uncertainty required by both climate science and modelling communities. In its contribution to climate and Earth system science, this programme has published over 700 peer-reviewed articles, and supported the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) headline statements on climate in both its fifth Assessment Report and subsequent reports, such as the ‘Special Report on Oceans and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate’, with ongoing involvement in the IPCC's sixth assessment cycle. Besides providing an overview on CCI, this presentation will make the link between CCI and ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, demonstrating the contribution that SMOS data can make in the creation of climate data records (CDR). Several CDRs are already including SMOS data on a regular basis, such as the sea surface salinity and soil moisture long-term data sets. There is also potential for using SMOS data for sea ice, biomass and vegetation climate data records.