1. SMOS
Summary ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission is dedicated to making global observations of soil moisture over land…
4. COMET
Summary
COMET builds a real interface between two communities that have long worked in parallel: the Earth observation community and the climate modeling community. The project aims to enhance the use of satellite-derived climate data in ocean and sea ice modelling by integrating high-quality long-term EO records from ESA’s Climate Change Initiative (CCI) for key Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) such as sea surface temperature and salinity, sea ice, and sea level.
By applying advanced data assimilation, model calibration, and machine learning techniques, COMET addresses key scientific challenges in climate modelling, particularly in polar regions, and contributes to more accurate and reliable representations of present and future climate conditions.
Why it matters: the project supports the advancement of the CMCC Earth System Model and contributes to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 7 (CMIP7), helping shape the next IPCC assessment cycle. In short, work done in COMET feeds into the science that informs global climate policy.
Our contribution
We lead the COMET project, coordinating an international consortium and developing the software that processes satellite data and transforms it into formats directly usable by climate modelers, a critical step in making EO records assimilable into complex physical models.
Beyond the software layer, the project introduces new integration schemes that incorporate machine learning techniques to improve model calibration and the representation of reality within climate simulations.
Key activities:
- Project leadership and consortium coordination.
- Software development to bridge EO and climate modeling workflows.
- Tailoring and harmonization of CCI ECVs (SST, SSS, sea level, sea ice) for climate model use.
- Integration of machine learning for improved calibration and representation.
- Direct contribution to CMIP7-relevant model development.
- Indirect contribution to the next IPCC assessment cycle.
Dates
- Status: Ongoing.
Partners
- Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC) — Spain.
- Fondazione Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC) — Italy.
- European Space Agency (ESA) — funding agency.
