CEOS-CGMS Joint Working Group on Climate (JWGClimate)
The first meeting of the joint Working Group on Climate (JWGClimate) of the Committee for Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) and the Coordination Group for meteorological Satellites (CGMS) took place on 5-7 March 2014 at EUMETSAT HQ, Darmstadt, Germany. The main topics included the next steps to be taken in implementing the Climate Strategy, the gap analysis that can be initiated from the ECV Inventory, the impact of the strategy report issued by the Carbon Task force.
The goals of this working group are to establish an inventory of existing records of Essential Climate Variables derived from observations from space, to plan the production of more Climate Data Records and to optimise planning of future satellites to expand records and avoid data gaps.
The meeting was followed by a workshop of the SCOPE-CM (Sustained, Co-Ordinated Processing of Environmental Satellite Data for Climate Monitoring) international initiative supported by the World Meteorological Organization and a network of operators of environmental satellite systems, where work plans for cooperative Climate Data Record generation projects were established.
The GHG Roadmap
JWGClimate has developed a roadmap to implement a constellation of satellites dedicated to observing and monitoring atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHG), namely carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄), from space.
The GHG Roadmap aims to coordinate efforts across CEOS and CGMS agencies to ensure the quality, transparency, and continuity of space-based GHG products for both scientific research and policy-making. Its ultimate goal is to establish operational systems that combine satellite-based GHG measurements with ground-based, airborne and shipborne observations of CO₂ and CH₄, addressing the needs of a wide range of stakeholders.
Within this roadmap, the GHG Task Team collaborates with the Atmospheric Composition Virtual Constellation of CEOS to monitor the status of current and upcoming satellite missions designed to measure atmospheric CO₂ and CH₄ at any scales. This includes missions operated by CEOS and CGMS agencies as well as private New Space organisations. Each mission’s objectives, capabilities and planned lifetime are idenitified in order to coordinate activities and highlight measurement gaps. A summary of these missions is available on https://ceos.org/ghg.
Further information on the CEOS-CGMS JWGClimate is available here.