At the 24th CEOS Plenary in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, CEOS agreed to adopt a new Working Group on Climate (WGClimate), to coordinate and encourage collaborative activities between the world’s major space agencies in the area of climate monitoring. The proposal for this group resulted from the efforts of a CEOS ad hoc Climate Advisory Group established in April 2010 at the CEOS SIT-25 Meeting in Tokyo, Japan.  Stephen Briggs (ESA) reported to Plenary on the process undertaken in 2010, which resulted in a proposal for CEOS to establish a standing Working Group on Climate. For the initial period of this new Working Group, Mark Dowell (EC/JRC) has agreed to be the Chair, and John Bates (NOAA) has agreed to be Vice Chair. The first meeting the Working Group was held in the May 2011 at ESA-ESRIN in Frascati, Italy.

The mandate of this new Working Group is to facilitate the implementation and exploitation of Essential Climate Variable (ECV) time-series through coordination of the existing and substantial activities undertaking be CEOS member agencies.  The details of these efforts can be found in the 'Terms of Reference" on this website. The working group will undertake it’s planned work through strong collaboration with the CEOS Climate SBA, the existing CEOS WGs (WGCV, WGEdu and WGISS) as well as with the CEOS Virtual Constellations.

The initial work for the WGClimate in the first year will include: a CEOS agency ECV meta-analysis to identify the current capability for producing ECVs; a second activity to address building a link to the IPCC modelling community to facilitate the inter-comparison of model outputs and data; and finally, to develop an ECV-by-ECV implementation strategy.