To interpret the observations and explain the causes of observed variability and change;
To interpret the observations and explain the causes of observed variability and predictions of future change;
To initialise models for seasonal and decadal timescale predictability;
To support CCI programme;
To foster the exploitation of Global Satellite Data Products within the Climate Modelling Community;
To assess quality and impact of individual/combined Global Satellite Data Products in Climate Model and Data Assimilation context.

CMCC role:
CMCC will lead the activities of WP5.2 aiming at assessing and evaluate the impact of vegetation phenology changes on observed and modelled land-atmosphere processes. This will be done by quantify relationships and sensitivities between phenological changes and land-atmosphere processes across spatio-temporal scales and habitat types utilizing the newly developed ECV Vegetation data for LAI, together with other ECV and relevant datasets.

Activities:
CMCC will establish a strong collaboration between the CMUG partners (expert data user) and the CCI Vegetation team to enable initial testing and feedback on the developing LAI and other vegetation datasets. Once the LAI data has been released, the second task in this WP will identify a set of phenological and land-atmosphere process indices, develop code and perform spatio-temporal analyses (e.g., habitat, climatic zone, local, and/or global) with ECV and other datasets (see list above) to characterize inter-relationships.

Expected results:
Establish a stable collaboration between the CMUG climate modelling group and the CCI Vegetation team to identify observed relationship between vegetation and land-atmosphere processes. This assessment will provide results for an internal report and, possibly, a scientific publication. 

Partners:
Met Office, DLR, Meteo-France, ECMWF, BSC, SMHI, IPSL, STFC, DMI, CMCC, UoL, UoE