The 2015 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Paris Agreement will drive climate policy during the next two decades and beyond. The agreement aims at limiting the temperature increase to well below 2°C and targeting 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, improving the ability to adapt to adverse impacts of climate change and to make finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate resilient development.

The first two aims can clearly be supported by observations including satellite data. Systematic observations of the climate system can contribute to support National Determined Contributions (NDC) reports by contributing to the provision of global and regional constraints on greenhouse gas sources and sinks derived from space based data. They can also support assessment of progress in adaptation by monitoring changes on the Earth Surface, e.g., forestation, changes in disaster impacts, evolution of urban areas, etc. from space. Results achieved through the analysis of satellite data provide significant information to IPCC reports via peer reviewed literature on the use of satellite data and products for GCOS ECVs fostering an improved understanding of the climate system. Finally this and the international coordination activities related to climate observations from space also provide significant input to SBSTA reports on the evolution of systematic observations of the climate system.

The support to the implementation of the Paris Agreement involves new challenges in particular in the use of space-based data in applications related to adaptation monitoring and the support to the NDCs. It is expected that GCOS will start a new activity on adaptation that will result in new needs and requirements that CEOS and CGMS need to consider in the future. Plans for and emerging climate data records needed for adaptation will become part of the Joint CEOS/CGMS Working Group on Climate inventory of climate data records for GCOS ECVs. By sustained gap analysis of the inventory and coordinated actions addressing missing parts, the space agencies will systematically arrive at providing the needed data products and services for adaptation.

The Joint CEOS/CGMS Working Group on Climate together with CEOS’ working groups on Calibration/Validation, Disasters, Information Systems & Services, and Capacity Building and some CGMS working groups are an established structure that is capable of efficiently responding to the needs that arise from the implementation of the Paris Agreement. The implementation of the Architecture for Climate Monitoring from Space plays a central role in ensuring that the needed observations at the needed quality are also made in the future, that derived data products respond to the needs of applications for which the data are used and that the applications provide the information needed by decision and policy making. In the context of the Paris Agreement this means that space-based observations with undoubted quality used in the process of the global stocktake can play a supporting role of providing evidence for the success of the implementation of the Paris Agreement.

The ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI) is a research programme which aims to realise the full potential of the long-term, global archives of Earth Observation data to generate satellite-based Essential Climate Variables (ECVs). ECV databases are required by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). CCI can and is supporting this effort.
Following the success of over 7 years of the first Phase of the CCI programme, the second Phase of CCI is now underway. The scope of the individual CCI projects focusses on the research, development and qualification of pre-operational ECV products and processing systems. Outcomes of the first Phase of CCI Projects include: i) a large portfolio of scientific publications in leading journals; ii) contributions to IPCC assessment reporting; iii) a common understanding on climate science, such as uncertainty characterisation, and inter-instrument harmonisation; iv) a large number of data products available from the CCI Data Portal, with significant international use of data products, and input to downstream analysis ready data products and climate services; and v) the transfer of CCI products from all projects to the operational Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
In the current Phase of CCI projects on nine new ECVs has begun: i) water vapour; ii) salinity; iii) sea state; iv) snow; v) permafrost; vi) high-resolution land cover; vii) lakes; viii) biomass; and ix) land surface temperature. In addition new research and development on the existing 13 projects from the first Phase is being initiated. Cross-ECV scientific exploitation is a further area of research which aims to bring together knowledge from several CCI projects to tackle a specific climate challenge. The final steam of work relates to outreach and communication.

Determining the stability of Climate Data Records (CDRs) over long timescales is important not only for demonstrating compliance with Global Climate Observing System and other requirements, but also for allowing understanding of the biases associated with the CDR. Such error estimates are important for climate modelling data assimilation methods and trend analysis as well as being used as a feedback to allow the improvement of the CDR retrieval algorithm.

This study focuses on the definition and assessment of stability monitoring methods for satellite-derived products using the case study of soil moisture. The ESA climate change initiative soil moisture product version 4.4 (www.esa-soilmoisture-cci.org) is used as an example in this study, but the aim is to create a generalised method which can be implemented for not only other soil moisture products but also for other Essential Climate Variables. For soil moisture, the methods derived will be transferred to the Quality Assurance for Soil Moisture (QA4SM) online automated validation tool (www.qa4sm.eodc.eu).

Reference soil moisture data, both from in-situ sensors from the International Soil Moisture Network and global models (GLDAS-Noah, ERA-Interim/Land, ERA-5 and MERRA2), are used to assess the stability over the length of the CDR. This is achieved by determining and tracking the correlation and other metrics in particular time periods and subdivisions thereof for different land cover and climate types.

The ultimate aim of the study is to provide details of the portion of the temporal trends in the dataset which can be attributed to the sensors utilised and that which can be attributed to the retrieval methodology. Using this information, it may be possible to disentangle these contributors from the physical trends associated with soil moisture.

The presentation will show the methods utilised in the assessment of the stability, the results of the stability assessment and how such information can be used when using the ESA CCI SM v04.4 dataset.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) is one of the six core Services of the European Union Copernicus programme. C3S is implemented by ECMWF on behalf of the European Commission. C3S enters its fourth year of development. 2018 has been a critical year for C3S as a transition between a prototyping phase into a full operational Service. A wide variety of products is now routinely made available and accessed by thousands of users. A unique and strong point of C3S is to focus on delivering operationally “authoritative” data, via its climate data store. A prime user of the Service is the European Commission itself, and C3S strives to support policy makers and public authorities at European level and beyond, by providing the environmental information they need to inform their policies and legislations, which become critically important in view of following up the Paris Agreement, and supporting the UNFCCC Sustainable Development Goals, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, etc. A special effort has been dedicated to support WMO and GCOS, in particular by routinely producing a number of agreed climate indicators as well as contributing to the WMO State of the Climate reports.
In addition, by providing access not only to high quality data but also tools, guidance and compute facilities to handle and transform these data, C3S ambitions to be an enabler for downstream climate service applications tailored to various local and sectoral needs.
This presentation will provide an overview of the State-of-Play of C3S and its main components: from ECV (Essential Climate Variable) products which largely inherit from the ESA Climate Change Initiative, global reanalyses, seasonal forecasts, climate scenarios to sectoral climate impact indicators, as well as the processes put in place for the quality assurance of these elements. Last but not least, the presentation will cover the foreseen evolution of the Service until and beyond 2020, including its ambition to contribute to a future European CO2 Anthropogenic Emission Monitoring System.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) are the most important atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHG), modified by anthropogenic activity. They have been classified as Essential Climate Variables (ECVs). The first ECV GHG data products, retrieved from satellite-measured radiance spectra, have been generated within the framework of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) taking into account GCOS (Global Climate Observing System) requirements. The core data products as generated within the GHG-CCI project (http://www.esa-ghg-cci.org/) are column-averaged dry-air mole fractions of CO2 and CH4, denoted XCO2 (in ppm) and XCH4 (in ppb). These products are retrieved from SCIAMACHY/ENVISAT and TANSO-FTS onboard the Japanese GOSAT satellite. The main purpose of these data products is to use them in combination with (inverse) modelling to improve our knowledge on their various natural and anthropogenic sources and sinks. Currently, these data products are generated operationally within the framework of the European Commission (EC) Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S, https://climate.copernicus.eu/), which is implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) on behalf of the EC. The corresponding ECV GHG Climate Data Records (CDRs) are available for interested users via the Copernicus Climate Data Store (CDS, https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu). Preliminary data products are generated in near-real-time in the framework of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS, https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/) to support daily forecasts of CO2 and CH4. In this presentation a synopsis of these XCO2 and XCH4 data products will be presented. The current generation of CO2 satellites are not optimized for monitoring anthropogenic CO2 emissions. In order to improve this situation in the future and to address the needs of the Paris Agreement, the EC and ESA are currently working - in cooperation with other agencies and scientific experts - on the specification of a candidate Copernicus expansion mission for anthropogenic CO2 Monitoring (CO2M) and an overview about this activity will also be presented. Together with the already flying Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor and the planned Copernicus Sentinel-5 missions, the Copernicus Programme would then evolve into operational monitoring of CO2 and CH4 including measurements in support of the Paris Agreement of 2015.