Topic 5a - ESA Climate Change Initiative
Welcome to Week 5. This week will look at how Earth observation data are managed, the current methods used and some of the future challenges for handling and accessing large amounts of EO data.
ESA’s Climate Change Initiative (CCI) is instrumental in supporting the long term monitoring of a series of so-called ‘Essential Climate Variables’ (ECVs). The Climate Change Initiative focuses on key ECVs that can be assessed from space, potentially almost continuously and over long time scales. This includes a range of variables such as ocean colour, greenhouse gases, atmospheric aerosols, sea level, sea ice, land cover and burned area. Observations from space allow consistent and comparable measurements of these ECVs to be taken across the globe, providing valuable long term information about the effects, and in some cases also the contributing drivers, of climate-related changes in these environmental variables. EO data also provides information on the degree of natural variability that can be expected in these aspects of the Earth system.
In this video, we explore how ESA’s CCI is advancing our understanding of climate-related changes associated with a number of ECVs, in part by enabling observations from different satellite missions and instruments to be confidently blended into a single, consistent longer-term record, with well understood uncertainties, which can be used to study both trends and natural variability.
Featured Educators:
- Dr Mathias Disney
Other Featured Experts:
- Dr Paolo Cipollini
- Professor Chris Merchant
- Dr Stephanie Henson
View featured satellites on the satellite tracking app
Don’t forget you can download the video, transcript and take any quizzes available with the links on the right.
