The Climate Modelling User Group's initial assessments of CCI datasets
Saunders, Roger¹; Team, CMUG^2
1Met Office, UNITED KINGDOM; ²Met Office, ECMWF, MPI, MeteoFrance, UNITED KINGDOM

One of the first activities of ESA's climate change initiative was to set up a climate modelling users group (CMUG) in order to gather requirements, monitor the plans of the individual teams producing climate data records (CDRs) and to assess if the CDRs produced will be used by the climate modelling and reanalysis communities. Recently some of the teams have started to release preliminary subsets o f their datasets which has allowed an initial assessment of their fidelity for climate research to be made. An assessment by the CMUG partners of the initial releases of the sea surface temperature, ocean colour, sea level, soil moisture, land cover, and ozone datasets will be presented. This will comprise not only looking at the primary variables of each ECV but also the associated uncertainty estimates necessary for climate modelling and reanalysis applications. Proposals for studying the datasets in a more integrated assessment through assimilation or consistency will be given. The proposed means of making the CCI datasets available to the climate modelling and reanalysis research communities will also be discussed together with the agreed data formats.