How climate change impacts the land and vice versa

In this week, you will learn about some of the highlights of European Space Agency’s (ESA) contributions to land research through the Climate Change Initiative (CCI). Additionally, you will learn how to retrieve, visualise, and understand publicly available data from the Open Data Portal.

This week includes videos, activities, and articles that illustrate the necessity of observing terrestrial essential climatic variables (ECVs) using satellite data.

The articles in this course are interchanged with exercises in Jupyter notebooks and Climate Analysis Toolbox, CATE. These exercises will show you how to create a query and download the free CCI datasets from the portal, as well as how to visualise and evaluate the datasets. If you have not done so, we strongly recommend you to follow the [CATE tutorial of the introduction week of this course] /courses/understanding-climate-change-using-satellite-data/1/steps/1271881), so you can set up the Jupyter environment and conduct the exercises. In addition, we hope that these exercises will motivate you to develop your studies and take further advantage of the work of the Climate Change Initiative Programme.

Figure 1: Terrestrial water and energy cycles. (Click to expand)

In this week we will cover the following subjects:

• Land-climate interactions
• Terrestrial essential climate variables
• Setting up a processing chain using Jupyter notebook and CATE functionalities to interpret and analyse essential climate variables

Up next

In the following video, you will hear Prof. Pierre Defourny, the scientific leader of the land cover project.