Description
The Climate Modelling Users Group (CMUG) has worked for seven years on defining user requirements, assessing precursor and CCI climate datasets, and promoting the CCI datasets to the climate research and modelling community. The main goals and activities of the CMUG Phase 2 proposal are:
1. To carry out a more extensive (than was possible in Phases 1 and 2) independent assessment of the CCI datasets.
2. CMUG will perform two main assessments. One in Years 1 and 2, based on the CCI products available at that time, and one in Year 3 on the newly available CCI+ products available at that time.
3. Benchmarking models with ESA CCI data in the era of CMIP6: This activity will engage with international Model Intercomparison Projects (MIPs), other projects (e.g. the EU project CRESCENDO, PRIMAVERA), and Obs4MIPs to foster the use of ESA CCI data in the routine evaluation and benchmarking of Earth System Models (ESMs).
4. The interface of the CCI satellite datasets to these global and regional climate services is being defined as these services are now being operationally implemented. The CMUG activity for understanding user requirements (WP1) will include canvassing the needs of climate service users.
5. To document how the uncertainties provided with the ECV datasets are used in the various applications demonstrated by CMUG and to assess if they are useful for climate modelling purposes.
6. Outreach and coordination is an important element of the CMUG work once the CCI datasets become available. Links to coordinate/collaborate with other programmes/organisations.