ESA’s Climate Change Initiative (CCI) consists of 27 projects geared towards producing data on Essential Climate Variables – physical, chemical and biological characteristics that contribute to the Earth’s climate – plus a dedicated climate modelling project, a comprehensive data portal, a toolbox to facilitate product analysis, and a visualization tool to support outreach.
CPOM is involved in two CCI; Antarctica and Greenland.
CCI Ice Sheets Greenland
The Greenland CCI aims to maximize the impact of ESA satellite data on climate research by analysing data from missions such as ERS, Envisat, CryoSat, GRACE and the new Sentinels. The project will produce data products on surface elevation change, ice velocity, calving front location, grounding line location and gravimetry mass balance, all of which are important in characterising the Greenland Ice Sheet as an Essential Climate Variable.
The CCI data will be supplemented with data from missions such as Landsat and ICESat in order to provide consistent, long term time series. Together with melt extent data from satellite microwave observations, the CCI Greenland Ice Sheet data sets will improve the monitoring of the most rapidly changing ice sheet on the planet. CPOM contributes to the surface elevation change product algorithm development.
Recent CPOM Publications related to this project
- Mass balances of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets monitored from space. Surveys in Geophysics. 2023.
- Mass balance of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets from 1992 to 2020. Earth System Science Data. 2022.
- Evaluating GRACE Mass Change Time Series for the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheet—Methods and Results
- ESA ice sheet CCI: derivation of the optimal method for surface elevation change detection of the Greenland ice sheet – round robin results
