Ocean Colour Climate Change Initiative — Approach and initial results

Abstract

The Ocean-Colour Climate-Change Initiative (OC-CCI) aims to create a long-term, consistent, error-characterised time series of ocean-colour products, for use in climate change studies. Climate Change Initiative is a programme of the European Space Agency devoted to using satellites to generate climate quality time series data of Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) identified by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS). Within the ocean colour CCI project, a user consultation was undertaken, targeting both the climate modelling community and the Earth Observation community. Taking the user requirements into account, a set of criteria was developed, for selecting the best ocean-colour algorithms for climate research. Candidate atmospheric correction algorithms and in water algorithms have been submitted to a round robin comparison. The overall best performers are being used to generate test products, to be evaluated further.