International Climate Initiative

ECMWF operates the Copernicus Climate Change Service on behalf of the European Union and will bring together expertise from across Europe to deliver the service.

The Copernicus Climate Change service will combine observations of the climate system with the latest science to develop authoritative, quality-assured information about the past, current and future states of the climate in Europe and worldwide. The service will benefit from a network of observations, both from in situ and satellite sensors, and modelling capabilities. Moreover, it will provide key indicators on climate change drivers (such as carbon dioxide) and impacts (such as sea level height or reducing glaciers). This information will serve a number of sectors sensitive to climate change, including energy, water management, agriculture & forestry, tourism, insurance, transport, health, disaster risk reduction, coastal areas and infrastructure.

This presentation will provide an overview of the development of this new Service which is currently in a proof-of-concept phase. It will focus on the use of earth observations and reanalyses for the production of essential climate variable datasets required in the provision of key indicators for the economic sectors that are affected by climate change.

This paper presents the concept and first results of the Copernicus Climate Change Service Fitness-for-Purpose (C3S F4P) project. The main goal aims at evaluating the efficiency and overall performance of the service mainly with regard to users' information needs and high level requirements. This project will also assess the fitness-for-purpose of the C3S with a specific emphasis on the needs of EU Policies and translate these recommendations into programmatic and technical requirements. The C3S Climate Data Records (CDS) include various Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) that are derived from space sensors, including from Copernicus Sentinels sensors. One module of the F4P platform focuses on the benchmarking of data sets, algorithms, radiative transfer model towards the understanding why there are discrepancies between CDS records. Methods and preliminary results of the benchmark platform will be shown.

In the early 1990s, research space agencies took the lead in advancing our ability to observe the Earth system at the time, space and accuracy scales to distinguish climate processes.

Research Agencies invested in the creation of consistent time-series satellite data sets over decades, both through mission science, measurement-based climate product processing and reprocessing. Research Agencies have also made maintained a significant investment in calibration laboratories, airborne sensors, processing facilities, and ground networks that support calibration and validation activities for satellite programmes.

As the prospect of "operational" climate observation systems underpinning climate services is now becoming a reality the climate community has stressed that the overarching goal of observing and monitoring the climate system requires a sustained expert understanding of new and legacy climate sensors and a sustained web of support activities. This sustained web will require the continued effort of both research and operational agencies.

Within Europe, across many contributing organisations and institutions, we have alway remained at the forefront of these developments, both on defining dedicated programmes at the European level, as well as playing leading roles in international coordination mechanisms.

With the advent of the "Copernicus-era" this invaluable heritage and consolidated competences must be taken full advantage of. Furthermore, this must be done ensuring that the operational requirements are fulfilled, through the provision of sustained observations and the resulting climate data records, whilst at the same time that the technical and scientific state-of-the-art and the underlying infrastructure required to do this is maintained.

Within this context, here we introduce initial considerations on the a revision of a study from 2010 which contributed to the early discussions on a climate element for the Copernicus Programme. In revisiting that study we take advantage of more recent analyses of existing and planned observational capacity, derived climate data records as well as the now, more established, programmatic developments both within individual intuitions as well as at the European scale. Finally we provide a synthesis of transition relations between the individual institutions that provide a framework going forward, to both ensure the operational provision of the dedicated data records as well as the continued development activities to guarantee that European Climate observations remain receptive to scientific progress in the field.

As a contribution to the forward look that the GEO is taking for the second decade of the GEOSS, the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) of the International Council of Science recently made a well-received offer to develop a roadmap for observation and modelling of the integrated Earth system, focussed on the coming ten years. The roadmap report was released in late 2015. It is concerned with observations and their use with integrated (or coupled) modelling of the physical and biogeochemical processes operating in the atmosphere, oceans and land, including ice and snow interfaces, on timescales out to a century or so. The aim of the study team was to cover the principal types of observation that are made today or planned for the future, with a view to 2025 and beyond, and to identify gaps and risks in data provision that threaten the quality of near-real-time services and the integrity and utility of long-term climate records. The report discusses how a single observation may serve multiple purposes and how there is much in common to be faced in the modelling needed for different applications. No simple set of priorities emerges from the report, though it acknowledges that balances have to be struck between long-term measurement programmes and occasional more ground-breaking investigative missions, and between investment in improving existing components of models and incorporating additional processes. It also recognises that both improved observations and improved extraction of information from existing observations have parts to play. It discusses needs both for remote sensing from space and for in situ measurement and land-, sea- and air-based remote sensing, but gives more emphasis to observation from space in view of the particular role of COSPAR. It is not intended to be a comprehensive fully referenced review, but reference is given to some influential past scientific papers and reports, to recent reviews and to many other papers and reports chosen for illustrative purposes. The present paper provides an outline of the roadmap and emphasizes its main conclusions and recommendations.

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