The ESA's Climate Change Initiative provides long-term global climate data from ESA's Earth-observing satellites and from other space agencies in order to support climate change research and the implementation of mitigation and adaptation strategies. The initiative was presented at the occasion of the UN Climate Change Conference that took place in Copenhagen in December 2009. At that time, ESA's activities on monitoring forests, as part of the GMES services, were also presented.
During the event entitled "Global Monitoring of our Climate: the Essential Climate Variables", which was hosted by ESA on 10 December 2009 in the framework of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, speakers from various agencies highlighted the role of Earth Observation satellites for the provision of systematic global climate observations. The latter are of paramount importance for climate change research and for managing mitigation and adaptation strategies.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has long recognised the need for global observations of climate variables for the assessment of the state of the climate. Using space technology, the new ESA's Climate Change Initiative will provide free of charge a set of long-term global records of essential climate variables to climate research and modelling communities worldwide. These records are required by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) – an organisation in the framework of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) – to support the UNFCCC and the International Panel on Climate Change.
The ESA's initiative will build on the availability of Europe's global data sets (obtained through its fleet of Earth-observing satellites, including the Earth Explorers and Sentinels) as well as on data delivered by a network of other space agencies. The ESA's contribution will encompass data archived during the last three decades, combined with data from new missions. These data will be used to produce information on a wide range of climate variables such as greenhouse-gas concentrations, sea-ice extent and thickness, and sea-surface temperature and height. The activities necessary to generate essential climate variables will be implemented by ESA, in partnership with key users such as GCOS and UNFCCC, space agencies, relevant players in the field of climate change research and monitoring such as the European Commission, WMO, NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), EUMETSAT and national programmes.
At the event in Copenhagen, it was recognised that there is a need for space agencies to coordinate and work together in order to strengthen the operational monitoring of climate through Earth Observation. In addition, the need for getting data to developing countries and for achieving free exchange of data was underlined.
Finally, the ESA's activities on monitoring forests, which were developed as part of the GMES services, were also presented at Copenhagen. In this context, the Forest Monitoring project funded by ESA was initiated to help establish a mechanism for measuring deforestation. The space monitoring of forests will underpin political agreement on schemes such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) under the UNFCCC.
More information at:
www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMCGJ7JT2G_index_0.html
www.gmes-forest.info