Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) evolution: new and innovative processing and methods for future Sentinels and other satellites for reanalyses

Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• Innovative methods to prepare and pre-process observational input for Earth-system reanalysis datasets, including the Copernicus Sentinel missions, which will lead to an increase in the use of observations for Earth-system reanalysis;
• Enhanced sparse data assimilation and initialisation methods of climate sub-component (e.g., atmosphere, ocean, land, hydrology) in Copernicus products;
• Comprehensive and better information about the climate records to be extracted from the available observations improving our overall monitoring of the climate and climate change;
• Expanded range of reanalyses products towards centennial reanalyses, and enhanced climate counterfactuals data sets to support data-driven predictions and the ongoing operationalisation of extreme event attribution.

The areas of R&I to address the above expected outcomes include:

• Improve the ability of Copernicus’ and other models to assimilate new and other satellite observations (e.g. the Copernicus Sentinel Expansion and Next Generation missions, contributing missions, meteorological satellites, research satellites) that are sensitive to surface parameters and fluxes. It is also necessary to undertake research on information content of early satellite data and unlock their exploitation in reanalyses at global and regional scales;
• Exploit innovative methods (including AI/ML) for data rescue for in situ and remote sensing observations, in particular regarding past and changing observing methods and environmental factors, and on error analysis, quality control and bias adjustment of the historical observation record. The aim is to make best possible use of early observations from various records of in situ and remote sensing observations to improve physically consistent analyses of the atmosphere, the ocean, the land and the cryosphere towards centennial timescales;
• Improve the use of Sentinel and other data in all Copernicus reanalyses and their use across different services. Beyond processing and reprocessing activities, specific coordinated developments in terms of observation operators and observational error characterization will be required;
• Explore innovative methods (e.g. AI/ML) to accelerate the production and updates of reanalyses, to capture reanalyses uncertainties efficiently, and to reduce overall computing energy/carbon footprint.

The C3S reanalyses represent a significant portion of the service data requests and are at the heart of the service product line and further exploitation (e.g. initialising climate predictions, evaluation of climate historical projections, climate intelligence, development of climate applications, AI/ML weather forecasts). The preparation of the future C3S coupled Earth system reanalyses is underway to significantly improve the consistency across earth system components and lengthen the timespan. An extension of the reanalyses back to the early 1900’ would meet many requirements of users but such a task would be impossible without an adequate investment in data rescue and in the reprocessing of EO data. Reanalyses play a key and vital role in climate monitoring and in the attribution of extreme events, but the development of the required counterfactual dataset is often ad-hoc and lacks operational implementation.

Bringing together European expertise on a wide variety of observations, climate data records and global and regional reanalyses will be paramount, and this will require a very tight collaboration with space agencies, the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services, and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). International cooperation is hence strongly encouraged in this topic. This will fully realise the progressive exploitation of Copernicus Sentinel and other data for the monitoring of a changing climate over Europe and worldwide. In addition, the proposal should include some demonstrations of downstream applications that would benefit from these improvements. Synergies with Destination Earth are also encouraged.

Additionally, the transfer of research results to operations should receive active attention during the project to strengthen the readiness for an operational deployment in the future. Appropriate involvement and/or interaction with the relevant Entrusted Entities of the Copernicus services, the conditions for making available, for re-using and exploiting the results (including IPR) by the said entities should be addressed during the project implementation. Software should be open licensed.

In this topic, the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content should be addressed only if relevant in relation to the objectives of the research effort.