Projects
Across the European Space Agency's Climate Change Initiative (CCI) programme, there are over 27 Essential Climate Variable (ECV) projects. For information about each ECV, including their objectives, team members, news, documentation, data and more, visit the projects listed below.
Aerosol
The Aerosol project provides independently validated, high quality algorithms for processing long-term records of global aerosol properties from European satellite instruments.
Visit Project
Anthropogenic Water Use
Developing a precursor satellite product to address the Anthropogenic Water use Essential Climate Variable
Visit Project
Biomass
The Biomass project currently provides global maps of above-ground biomass for 2007, 2010 and annually from 2015-2022 together with change products between years and associated quality flag maps.
Visit Project
Cloud
Generating long-term and coherent cloud property datasets that exploit multiple Earth observation missions
Visit Project
Fire
The Fire_cci project aims to improve consistency, using better algorithms for both pre-processing and burned area detection while incorporating error characterisation.
Visit Project
Greenhouse Gases (GHGs)
The Greenhouse Gas (GHG) CCI+ project aims to further develop retrieval algorithms needed to generate new high quality satellite-derived CO2 and CH4 atmospheric data products.
Visit Project
Glaciers
The main objective of the Glaciers CCI project is to contribute to the efforts of creating a globally complete and detailed glacier inventory as requested by GCOS.
Visit Project
High Resolution Land Cover
The HR Land Cover CCI studies and investigates the role of the spatial resolution of land cover and land cover change in supporting climate modelling research at regional scale.
Visit Project
Ice Sheets (Antarctic)
The Antarctic Ice Sheet project develops methods for producing long-term and reliable climate data records of Antarctica from satellite observations.
Visit Project
Ice Sheets (Greenland)
The Greenland Ice Sheets project produces data products of five ECV parameters, which are important in characterizing the Greenland Ice Sheet
Visit Project
Lakes
The overarching objective of the Lakes project is to produce and validate a consistent data set of the variables grouped under the Lakes ECV.
Visit Project
Land Cover
The Land Cover project critically revisits all algorithms required for the generation of a global land product in the light of GCOS requirements.
Visit Project
Land Evaporation
Generating long-term global land evaporation records using Earth observation data
Visit Project
Land Surface Temperature
The project aims to provide an accurate view of temperatures across land surfaces globally over the past 20-25 years.
Visit Project
LOng-LIved greenhouse gas PrOducts Performances (LOLIPOP)
A CCI project to assess the state-of-the-art satellite measurements of 'other long-lived greenhouse gases'
Visit Project
Ocean Colour
This project focuses on the Ocean Colour ECV encompassing water-leaving radiance in the visible domain, derived chlorophyll and inherent optical properties and utilises data archives from Copernicus, ESA, NASA and NOAA.
Visit Project
Ocean Surface Heat Flux
Developing a total Ocean Surface Heat Flux data record, a key variable in understanding Earth’s energy balance
Visit Project
Ozone
The Ozone project focuses on the generation of multi-decadal time series of harmonised and consistent ozone data suitable to assess long-term changes in total ozone, as well as its vertical distribution.
Visit Project
Permafrost
This project is developing permafrost time series maps as Essential Climate Variable products primarily derived from satellite measurement
Visit Project
Phytoplankton biomass and diversity Climate Change Initiative (PHYTO-CCI)
Developing satellite-based data products for phytoplankton carbon biomass and pigment diversity
Visit Project
Precursors for aerosols and ozone
developing long term, satellite-derived climate data records for the Precursors for Aerosol and Ozone Essential Climate Variable
Visit Project
River Discharge
This project aims to produce and validate a consistent data set of the variables grouped under the River Discharge Essential Climate Variable
Visit Project
Sea Ice Age and Drift (SAGE)
Creating the first global data records of sea ice age and drift to support climate research
Visit Project
Sea Ice
The project aims to advance the retrieval capability for two main variables of the Sea Ice Essential Climate Variable (ECV): Sea ice concentration and sea ice thickness.
Visit Project
Sea Level
The Sea Level CCI project's main objective is to produce and validate a Sea Level Essential Climate Variable (ECV) product. This is achieved through four supporting aims.
Visit Project
Sea Level Budget Closure
This project aims to reduce current uncertainties of sea level change and its individual components, resulting in better closure of the sea level budget.
Visit Project
Sea State
The Sea State project is developing an 18-year data set (2002-2020) capitalising on the rich satellite altimeter, SAR imager, and other data holdings available during that period.
Visit Project
Sea Surface Salinity
Generating improved calibrated global Sea Surface Salinity fields from all available satellite L-band radiometer measurements.
Visit Project
Sea Surface Temperature
The project aims to make climate data records for SST longer, more stable and more accurate, providing data users with different forms of data and documentation.
Visit Project
Snow
The Snow project generates long-time series of daily global snow extent maps from optical satellite data and daily global snow water equivalent products from passive microwave satellite data.
Visit Project
Soil Moisture
The project generates long-term global soil moisture records that contribute to hundreds of hydrological and climatological studies worldwide, as well as the annual BAMS "State of the Climate" reports.
Visit Project
Vegetation Parameters
The Vegetation Parameters project of the ESA Climate Change Initiative
Visit Project
Water Vapour
The Water Vapour project is generating new global high-quality climate data records of both total column and vertically resolved water vapour
Visit Project