Verification and updates of the ESA-CCI land cover product

This talk introduces the initial actions within the EUMETNET/C-SRNWP project ‘Evaluation and updates of ESA-CCI global land cover map for NWP needs’. We present the coordination activities of the working group and the first steps verifying and updating the latest ESA-CCI land cover map of 2020. Hereby, we started a survey in June 2021 with all members of the C-SRNWP Surface Expert team to evaluate their needs and possible future plans related to the usage of the ESA-CCI land cover product. The results show a clear need for accurate water information and the distinction between fresh and salt water. In addition, the distinction between lakes and rivers would be a benefit. Hence, we tried to find an up-to-date and accurate global water mask as reference to replace existing water bodies in the ESA-CCI land cover with new classes for fresh and salt water. In this manner, we use the Open Street Map (OSM), which is open source with a high level of detail and is updated continually by a community of more than eight million members. In a second step, we tried to find an adequate platform where scientists can report their founded issues on the ESA-CCI land cover map. We consider the open source end-to-end software development platform Gitlab as a suitable environment where scientists can interact also through programming codes. As an outlook regarding the other outcome of the survey, the level of detail of the urban class requires improvements and has to be divided in more subclasses using as e.g. Local Climate Zones.