Philosophy

CM-SAF role in climate monitoring and research

In recent decades, climate variability and change have caused impacts on natural and human systems on all continents. Observations are needed to understand and document these interactions of the climate system. They are increasingly based on remote sensing from satellites which offer global scale and continuous coverage.

Only long term and consistent observations of the earth system allow us to quantify impacts of climate variability and change on the natural and human dimension. From this understanding we can estimate and eventually predict future states of the earth system and quantify its vulnerability and resilience to continuing anthropogenic forcing. With accurate climate predictions we can help to decide on adaptation strategies, to protect our living planet and to secure socio-economic welfare.

The Climate SAFs contributes to

• the observational part by contributing relevant data records
• the understanding by supporting process studies, climate trend and variability analysis
• improve (climate) models by providing data records for validation and by provision of satellite simulators

RH / Nov2020