Communicating Climate Change with the ESA CCI’s Essential Climate Variables
Training Description
This in-person training session, held at the Living Planet Symposium 2025 in Vienna, Austria, introduced participants to ESA's Climate Change Initiative (CCI) Essential Climate Variables (ECVs). Participants learned how to access and analyse these datasets via the ESA CCI Open Data Portal and the ESA CCI Toolbox Python package. The session demonstrated how CCI data can be used to illustrate key climate change impacts such as increased sea surface temperature, rising sea levels and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events.
The practical exercises span three skill levels, covering topics from accessing and visualising ECVs data, to analysing sea surface temperature patterns in a changing climate and visualising and interpreting uncertainties in satellite-derived cloud datasets.
Training Objectives and Topics:
- Beginner Level: Illustrating Climate News Headlines with CCI Data - This notebook is designed for participants who have no prior experience in Python or climate data analysis. You will learn:
- How to access CCI climate data using the CCI Toolbox python Package
- How to navigate and subset climate data using Xarray
- How to create basic plots and statistics with Matplotlib
- How to save a figure you generated
- How to map and interpret ECVs changes over time and space
- Intermediate Level: Analyzing Sea Surface Temperature and El Niño in a Changing Climate using ESA CCI Data - By working through this notebook, you will:
- Access and explore CCI datasets using the ESA Climate Toolbox
- Create regional and temporal subsets of climate variables
- Visualize and analyze time series and spatial patterns
- Compare strong El Niño events (e.g., 1997, 2015) with neutral or La Niña years
- Reflect on the potential influence of climate change on El Niño behavior and impacts
- Optionally: explore uncertainties in cloud data and other advanced features
- Advanced Level: Uncertainties in Essential Climate Variables (ECVs): A Focus on Clouds - By the end of this section, you’ll gain a better understanding of:
- Why uncertainty information is critical for satellite climate datasets
- How the CCI represents and provides uncertainty
- How to visualize and work with these values in your own analyses
You can access the Jupyter Notebook training through the GitHub links below, or via the link to the Toolbox.
Training Materials
These Jupyter Notebooks are available in read-only format on GitHub. To interact with or modify the content, you can fork the repository or download the notebooks to your local environment.
GitHub Links
- Beginner Notebook - Access the beginner-level notebook
- Intermediate Notebook - Access the intermediate-level notebook
- Advanced Notebook - Access the advanced-level notebook
Useful Links
- The Toolbox (requires registration)
- ESA CCI Toolbox Information
- ESA CCI Toolbox Operations Guide
- Training Session Padlet