About

ESA has established the Climate Modelling User Group (CMUG) to place a climate system perspective at the centre of its Climate Change Initiative (CCI) programme, and to provide a dedicated forum through which the Earth observation data community and the climate modelling and reanalysis community can work closely together. CMUG will work with the other CCI projects to achieve this goal.

CMUG is a consortium comprising the Met Office Hadley Centre, DLR, ECMWF, IPSL, Météo-France, SMHI, BSC, CMCC, DMI, NCEO (University of Leicester), CEDA and NCEO (University of Edinburgh). See CMUG's 'Team' page here.

Why CMUG?

Our climate system is continuously changing, so we need to measure its changes globally and regionally, and to model the system to understand the causes of the changes. Given its excellent global and temporal coverage and high spatial resolution, satellite data is a valuable resource for both climate monitoring and model initialisation and evaluation.

We need to confront models with observations with the following aims:

• To interpret the observations and explain the causes of observed variability and change;
• To interpret the observations and explain the causes of observed variability and predictions of future change;
• To initialise models for seasonal and decadal timescale predictability.

The figure below shows the structure of the CMUG project.

CMUG Objectives

1. Support integration between CCI projects:

• Facilitating communication and engagement between projects
• Providing a forum for knowledge exchange, to avoid duplication and keep a climate perspective at the heart of CCI

1. Provide technical and scientific feedback to CCI projects on:

• Quality and consistency of data
• Useability and accessibility
• Documentation and metadata

1. Foster exploitation of Satellite-derived data products within the Climate Modelling Community by:

• Promoting the use of CCI data sets to climate modellers
• Building partnership and links with existing research organisations, networks and scientific bodies of the Climate Modelling Community
• Requirements gathering and user assessment from the user communities

1. Demonstrate quality and impact of individual or combined CCI ECV datasets for Climate research by:

• Assessing suitability of CCI products for climate applications (e.g. climate modelling, decadal prediction, reanalysis, etc)
• Demonstrating their value in improving model performance in an objective manner

Main CMUG Activities

1. Improve access to ECV datasets through development of tools and databases
2. Carry out scientific research to demonstrate the value and impact of CCI datasets for climate modelling
3. Assess consistencies across CCI ECVs from a user viewpoint
4. Promote and report on the use of the CCI data sets by climate modellers
5. Gather user requirements and feedback on the useability of the datasets and associated documentation, including gap analysis in existing climate monitoring
6. Make recommendations on all aspects of CCI data provision
7. Interaction with related climate modelling and reanalysis initiatives