Satellite based climate data records play an increasing role in climate monitoring and help to answer climate related questions. Nowadays satellite based climate data records cover a time period of several decades. EUMETSAT and it’s Satellite Application Facilities (SAF) provide a number of high quality climate data records for various geophysical variables, such as solar radiation, land surface temperature, cloud fractional cover, cloud microphysical variables, and many more, derived from both, geostationary and polar orbiting satellites.

These climate data records are free and open to everyone. They continue to be reprocessed to account for improvements of the algorithm and to include recent time periods. In addition to the data, free software tools, such as the CM SAF R Toolbox, are developed and provided by the SAF’s for users to work with the data.

This short course is an opportunity to get an overview about the climate data records available from the EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facilities, learn how to access them and gain some first experiences in how to work with the software tools provided. Participants will have the opportunity do hands-on exercises using the data and tools provided. Data and software developers will be available to help and answer questions.

Participants are invited to bring a laptop to the course, to install the software tools beforehand (www.cmsaf.eu/tools) and to download some data of interest from the Climate Monitoring SAF (www.cmsaf.eu). A guidance on how to do that is given in the COMET Module “Basic Climate Analysis using the CM SAF R Toolbox” available on https://www.meted.ucar.edu.

In addition participants are invited check out the data and products provided by the Land Surface Analysis SAF (https://landsaf.ipma.pt/en/), and the SAF on support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management (http://hsaf.meteoam.it/).