Phase 2 building upon the success of Phase 1

With the overarching goal of Phase 1 (2012-14) achieved, we are very happy to announce that the CCI SM project is now (Jan 2015) successfully in Phase 2. The Earth Observation Data Centre for Water Resources Monitoring GmbH (EODC) takes pride in its role as the prime contractor for this phase, with the rest of the consortium remaining largely unchanged from the Phase 1 team.

Phase 1, as demonstrated by the two releases of the 35 year Soil Moisture Climate Data Record (CDR), saw the project produce and validate, within an R&D context, the most complete and consistent possible time series of multi-sensor global satellite data products for climate research and modelling.

Phase 1 also saw the achievement of a number other goals including

• development and validation of the retrieval algorithms addressing the GCOS ECV requirements (ATDB, Round Robin exercises)
• optimising the impact of ESA EO missions on the climate data record
• generating the complete specifications for operational production process (Systems Specification Document)
• strengthening inter-disciplinary cooperation (within the EO, Climate Research and modelling communities) via a number of dedicated workshops and participation in a number of EU Meetings

Phase 2 (2015-17) now aims to achieve its goal of the “Graceful evolution of system from prototype from Phase I to a sustainable version”, and in working towards this goal will provide an operational framework for the production of the most complete and consistent possible multi-sensor global ECV soil moisture data records based on active and passive microwave sensors.

In Phase 2 the consortium, via its system engineering and software development teams, see the evolution of prototype ECV processor, its integration, along with associated datasets, and eventual operation in a virtual cloud processing environment, hosted by the EODC. The EODC provides direct access to the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC3), which is currently regarded as one of Europe’s most powerful computer processing environments. This phase foresees scientists from the EO and CRG teams taking full advantage of EODC’s infrastructure and coming together, as a community, to perform collaborative verification, validation and research activities, upon the climate research data package, within a dedicated science and development platform hosted as a virtual environment.