A European response
ESA and its Member States have developed the Climate Change Initiative (CCI) to help address issues related to our changing world. Through this dedicated programme, robust, long-term, global satellite datasets are produced.
These data are required by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) to support the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Archived satellite data from ESA, Member States and Third Party Missions going back three decades and more are combined with new data to generate information on a wide range of climate variables such as greenhouse-gas concentrations, sea-ice extent and thickness, sea-surface temperature and sea-level rise, to name but a few.
The Climate Change Initiative provides the science community and governing bodies with vital Earth observation datasets to understand and help mitigate climate change. All data products are freely available, along with supporting information about how they were defined, created and tested.
