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Supporting Policies


Several EC directives provide a framework to improve services like Climate Change monitoring as well as CO2 emissions and quality controlfor observation.

CO2 emissions

The European Union’s Copernicus programme has launched an initiative to support the stocktaking exercise with a new observation-based service to monitor CO2 emissions resulting from human activities. The analysis of these measurements will allow EU member states and other countries to track progress in achieving the Paris Agreement goals.

Observation-based information to make the assessments more comprehensive and consistent worldwide proposed by Copernicus service in collaboration with European Commission through a development on existing modelling infrastructure, designs a series of unprecedented satellite and ground-based observation systems, and improves model-based analysis.

This CO2 initiative constitutes a significant positive step towards climate change mitigation and will further consolidate Europe’s leading position on the global stage in this policy field of utmost and critical importance for mankind. “Copernicus – Europe’s eyes on Earth – is the largest environmental space programme ever designed in Europe to monitor our dynamic Earth.

Quality Control

The European Commission contributes to JRC contractual obligations for the long term support to the overall Copernicus fitness for purpose linked to (EU) No 377/2014 regulation.

This mission aims to assess the quality assurance of space and ground based land products and their retrieval methodologies.

Fitness for purpose of the Copernicus data records will be ensured, such that the quality requirements are verified to be compliant with users expectation (GCOS, 200). This is of particular importance in order to establish fundamental priorities for the long term of Copernicus implementation. Specifically, this action aims to evaluate the overall performance of Copernicus products, mainly with regard to user needs and translate findings into recommendations, programmatic and technical requirements.

Essential Climate Variables

This mission summarizes the findings during the first years of Copernicus program with emphasizes on assessment of uncertainties progress over terrestrial surfaces.

Global land reference datasets of Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) complemented by metadata and uncertainty estimates to update and expand the JRC's benchmark Earth Observation (EO) database created to support land and climate studies, and to interdependently address the fitness-for-purpose of EU Sentinel-3A and Sentinel-3B land products.

The Essential Climate Variables for assessment of climate variability from 2002 to present dataset contains a selection of climatologies, monthly anomalies and monthly mean fields of Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) suitable for monitoring and assessment of climate variability and change.

Zonally averaged FAPAR Anomalies from 1998-2010.
Zonally averaged FAPAR Anomalies from 1998-2010.

Satellite measurements are essential for monitoring terrestrial plant activity at the global scale: these measurements are used to retrieve the FAPAR, an es-sential climate variable [as defined by GCOS (2016)].

Comparisons between each dataset and with several proxy values using ground-based mea-surements provide an estimate of uncertainties and bias.