The ESA Climate Office has formulated strict data standards relating to validated, error-characterised Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) data products generated via the ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI).
The CCI Data Standards v2.3 details the set of requirements adopted to ensure consistency, harmonisation, and ease of use for the varied datasets spanning all CCI projects. This includes a CCI Ontology, a common vocabulary and metadata conventions.
CCI ECV datasets freely available without any restrictions on use once released onto the CCI Open Data Portal.
The ESA Climate Office works closely with the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) and operational climate services, in particular the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), to ensure coordination and consistency. The processing systems and algorithms for many of the ECV projects developed by CCI have been transferred to C3S for operational data provision. The ESA Climate Office is jointly developing data standards for ECVs with C3S.