The Ocean Colour Climate Change Initiative project aims to:

Develop and validate algorithms to meet the Ocean Colour GCOS ECV requirements for consistent, stable, error-characterized global satellite data products from multi-sensor data archives.

Produce and validate, within an R&D context, the most complete and consistent possible time series of multi-sensor global satellite data products for climate research and modelling.

Optimize the impact of MERIS data on climate data records.

Generate complete specifications for an operational production system.

Strengthen inter-disciplinary cooperation between international Earth observation, climate research and modelling communities, in pursuit of scientific excellence.

The ESA OC CCI project is following a data reprocessing paradigm of regular re-processings utilising on-going research and developments in atmospheric correction, in-water algorithms, data merging techniques and bias correction. This requires flexibility and rapid turn-around of processing of extensive ocean colour datasets from a number of ESA and NASA missions to both trial new algorithms and methods and undertake the complete data set production.

Read more about the Ocean Colour project on ESA's project website. https://climate.esa.int/en/projects/ocean-colour/.