1. Introduction

1.1. Project Background

ESA’s Climate Change Initiative is a major research and development effort that generates global, decades-long satellite data records to track and understand key aspects of the Earth climate system, and known as Essential Climate Variables.

The Programme enables a community of over 500 experts from across Europe to exploit the Earth observation archive and data from operating satellite missions to craft high-quality data products that strengthen scientific understanding climate and underpin the models and climate services used to inform support ESA Member States to take climate action and report progress towards the Paris Agreement goals.

These data records support the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the International Panel on Climate Change to monitor, assess and address changes to Earth’s climate system.

The CCI Toolbox and the CCI Open Data Portal are the two main technical support projects within the programme. The CCI Open Data Portal provides a single point of harmonised access to a subset of mature and validated ECV-related data products.

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Snapshot from CCI Open Data Portal with the available ECVs

The CCI Toolbox provides tools that support visualisation, analysis and processing across CCI and other climate data products. With these two technical cross-cutting activities ESA is providing an interface between its CCI projects and the ECVs generated there, and the wider climate change user community.

1.2. Key Objectives

The four key objectives of the CCI Toolbox are:

  • Provide to climate users an intuitive software application that is capable of ingesting data from all CCI projects and synergistically use this data in a uniform tooling environment. This requires the application to abstract from the various data types used to represent the different ECVs (vector data, n-D raster data), and from data formats used (NetCDF, Shapefiles), and also from various data sources (remote services, local files).

  • Provide to users a rich set of data processing operations that implement commonly used climate algorithms. Processors can be used to build processing chains that represent typical climate workflows.

  • Provide to users various visualisation and analysis operations. The majority of visualisation and analysis functions are applicable to multiple ECVs while others may only work if certain constraints are met. Some of these functions may be implemented as processors and be used in processing chains.

  • Provide the architecture of the CCI Toolbox so that it can be extended by new climate operations and that it also allows for reuse of existing or planned software tools and libraries. Furthermore allow other scientists and tool developers to use the underlying CCI Toolbox algorithms and libraries in their own programs.