The Copernicus Climate Change Service
Pinty, Bernard
EC, BELGIUM

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (Copernicus CC service) is an EU led initiative in response to environmental and societal overarching challenges associated with human-induced modification of the Earth Climate. It complements two existing horizontal Copernicus components dealing with security and emergency.

The Copernicus CC service will capitalize on three main components: sustained network of in situ and satellite-based observations, re-analysis of the Earth climate with a variety of models driven by observations, modelling scenarios based on a variety of climate projections. These three components will permit us deriving a panoply of climate indicators (e.g., temperature increase, sea level rise, ice sheet melting, ocean acidification, warming up of the ocean,...) and climate indices (e.g., based on records of temperature, precipitation, drought events) for both the identified climate drivers and the expected climate impacts. The pre-operational phase of the Copernicus CC service will definitely start with the 2013 FP7 Space call that identified 5 major domains of activities directly related to climate modelling and observation analyses. The proposed strategy is to build upon the proposals resulting from this and other efforts (e.g., ESA Climate Change Initiative, Eumetsat Climate SAF, EEA, WMO through the GFCS initiative,...). The enormous level of available information will then have to be harmonized, coordinated, tailored to the users' needs and quality checked.

The objective of this contribution is to present a logical view of the anticipated architecture for the Climate Change service that can cope with the ingestion of recent research findings while addressing its operational mandate to deliver information palatable to end users and customer DGs.