Goal: Our goal is to exploit EO to improve our national capability for climate prediction over timescales from months to decades.

Partners and Customers: National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS), QUEST (Quantifying and Understanding the Earth System), National Oceanographic Centre Southampton (NOCS), British Antarctic Survey (BAS), Met Office/Hadley Centre, European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF), Department for Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)

We are using Earth Observation (EO) data to improve our understanding and prediction of climate change. We are involved in the creation of good quality data for monitoring and diagnosis, and are working closely with other areas within NCEO so that together we can integrate EO with other global atmospheric, oceanic and climatic data sets. There are many new satellite missions which will be combined with existing data to enable us to comprehensively describe recent changes in the climate system.

We have some priorities:

• To compare what we know of the radiation budget, water vapour and clouds in climate prediction models with observations we can get from satellite instruments like the Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (GERB) and Cloudsat. Understanding the hydrological cycle, and how these feedbacks work is a major challenge.
• To use new space measurements of the oceans with measurements from ships and buoys and reanalyse ocean climate data to look at variability over tens of years and identify climate change fingerprints.
• To use measurements from Cryosat2 of sea-ice thickness to evaluate climate prediction models of the atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere system in the Arctic.

Click here to view the science theme proposal document