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Talks and Poster Presentations (without Proceedings-Entry):

W. Wagner, P. Defourny, E. Chuvieco:
"ESA CCI Datasets for the Terrestrial Environment and their Applications";
Talk: The Climate Symposium 2014, Darmstadt, Germany (invited); 2014-10-13 - 2014-10-17.



English abstract:
ESA´s Climate Change Initiative (CCI) programme covers currently a set of five terrestrial Essential Climate Variables, namely land cover, fire disturbance, soil moisture, glaciers and ice caps, and ice sheets (Hollmann et al., 2013). In this presentation the progress achieved with the first three of these terrestrial ECVs is discussed. Compared to atmospheric and oceanic ECVs, terrestrial ECVs are in general more heterogeneous in space and hence quite challenging to derive from observational satellite data records. This, in combination with the fact that the establishment of international coordination and measurement standards has ben been quite difficult for terrestrial ECVs (Bojinski et al., 2014), is probably the reason why the production of terrestrial ECVs has been lagging somewhat behind their atmospheric and oceanic counterparts. ESA´s CCI programme has contributed to closing this gap by establishing and further developing of production systems for the terrestrial ECVs land cover, fire disturbance and soil moisture. Consequently, it has been possible to produce and publicly realise several new terrestrial ECV products: The CCI land cover project delivered three global land cover maps corresponding to the 2000, 2005 and 2010 epochs at 300 m resolution, supplemented by data describing the dynamic properties of the land cover and water bodies in more detail. The CCI soil moisture project released the first long-term global soil moisture record (1978-2010) in June 2012; a second improved and updated (1978-2013) soil moisture data record will be released in July 2014. And finally, the CCI fire project will deliver a pixel and grid product for three global years 2006 to 2008, including the day of burned detection, confidence level, land cover burned, as well as an estimation of fire size distribution. The rapid uptake of the so-far released data sets by the user community is an indication that these ECV data sets will trigger a large number of applications. Some first key scientific findings based on the analysis and use of these terrestrial ECV data sets in climate investigations will be presented.

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