The Copernicus Climate Change Service Evolution (CERISE) project aims to enhance the quality of the C3S reanalysis and seasonal forecast portfolio, with a focus on land-atmosphere coupling. It will support the evolution of C3S by improving the C3S climate reanalysis and seasonal prediction systems and products towards enhanced integrity and coherence of the C3S Earth system Essential Climate Variables. CERISE will develop new and innovative coupled land-atmosphere data assimilation approaches and land initialisation techniques to pave the way for the next generations of the C3S reanalysis and seasonal prediction systems. These developments will include innovative work on observation operators using Artificial Intelligence to ensure optimal data fusion integrated in coupled assimilation systems. They will enhance the exploitation of Earth system observations over land surfaces, including from the Copernicus Sentinels and from the European Space Agency Earth Explorer missions, moving towards an all-sky and all-surface approach. CERISE Research and Innovation will bring the C3S tools beyond the state-of-the-art in the areas of coupled land-atmosphere data assimilation, observation operators, and land initialisation methodologies. CERISE will develop diagnostic tools and prediction skill metrics that include integrated hydrological variables to go beyond the traditional skill scores to assess Earth system coupled reanalysis and seasonal prediction. It will deliver proof-of-concept prototypes and demonstrators, to demonstrate the feasibility of the integration of the developed approaches in the operational C3S. The CERISE outputs aim at medium to long-term upgrades of the C3S systems with targeted progressive implementation in the next three years and beyond. CERISE will improve the quality and consistency of the C3S reanalysis and multi-system seasonal prediction, directly addressing the evolving user needs for improved and more consistent C3S Earth system products.

CICONIA’s ambition is to improve the understanding of non-CO2 emissions with regards to the current aircraft/engine technologies and operating fleet, as well as their evolution and their climate effects, but with the clear objective to evaluate and develop impact reduction solutions covering several promising mitigation options on flight operations, through the definition of innovative dedicated Concepts of Operations (CONOPS) and their assessment in comparison to legacy operations. CICONIA wants to define and assess CONOPS solutions with engagement from all concerned stakeholders: Airlines with their OCC, Network, Met providers and Air Traffic Control. CICONIA mitigation options will offer the best proposal for reduction in climate impacts, taking into account both, the CO2 and non-CO2 climate effects. A TRL4 is targeted at the end of the 3 years project. CICONIA is composed of the four main topics: 1. A weather service that will improve weather forecasting capabilities tailored for operational mitigation concepts, provide technical enablers definition and recommendation for long term improvement that will feed a better understanding of the stakes; 2. A climate enabler that will improve climate impact assessment and models tailored for operational mitigation concepts; 3. CONOPS strategies definition: CICONIA proposes to further analyse how operational stakeholders could integrate mitigations in their plan or in their tactical operations to mitigate climate impacts. A climate enhanced operations CONOPS will be delivered and assessed with representative fast time simulation platforms, integrating weather and climate models, enabling the evaluation of a large area and long time period. These simulations will support the assessment of the complete picture from climate, economics and operational impact points of view, conducting trades on different assumptions, understanding their impact on the decision making and finally providing guidance; 4. An ATM mitigation solution through trials: Investigate multiple ATM strategies for flights to minimise or avoid persistent warming contrails, through operational trials and data analysis. This solution will focus on reducing the climate impact of non-CO2 components, specifically by minimising crossings of persistent, highly warming contrails from aircraft in oceanic airspace. CICONIA aims as well at providing material to Authorities and Regulators, to analyse the appropriate rulemaking that could serve a fair and uniformed framework to minimise non-CO2 climate effects in a global environmental centric approach addressing as well CO2. Regulations aimed at mitigating non-CO2 effects through operational measures should be proven effective from a climate benefit standpoint, fair from an economic impact on the operator's standpoint, and operationally feasible/acceptable/manageable. An Advisory Board will federate external organisations who want to take part in the CICONIA results.

The objective of the SargAlert project is to significantly improve the forecasts of the strandings of the invasive algal species Sargassum in the tropical Atlantic Ocean, in the Caribbean Sea and on the Brazilian coast. The synergy between satellite data / ocean transport modeling / in-situ measurements will be used for that purpose. SargAlert will provide alert bulletins to end-users such as territorial authority, tourism, fishers. The challenges that will be addressed by SargAlert are as follows: - detection and monitoring of at different time (hour to daily) and spatial (20 m to 5 km) scales using a multi-sensor satellite data analysis (Low Earth and GEOstationary orbits), - improvement of Sargassum stranding forecasts by combining physical transport models with artificial intelligence approaches, - validation of satellite data products and forecast models using in-situ measurements, - production of alert bulletins to address societal issues. The innovative developments of the project will enable an integrative approach of the Sargassum stranding issues: synergy between satellite data, understanding of Sargassum spatio-temporal distribution, transport forecast. Improvements of ocean modeling of dynamics will benefit societal authorities to better respond to the risks induced by the more frequent and intense Sargassum blooms in the Atlantic Ocean. The operational Sargassum forecast center will thus have all required inputs to provide reliable forecasts in near real time. This federative and interdisciplinary project includes complementary partners from academic laboratories, including a human science team (AEM, IRISA, LATMOS, LC2S, LIS, Marbec, MIO, UFPE/UFRPE), from an operational forecast center (Météo-France) and from a national satellite data center (AERIS/ICARE).

Aviation is one of the most critical infrastructures of the 21st century. Even comparably short interruptions can cause economic damage summing up to the Billion-Euro range. As evident from the past, aviation shows certain vulnerability with regard to natural hazards. The proposal EUNADICS-AV addresses airborne hazards (environmental emergency scenarios), including volcano eruptions, nuclear accidents and emergencies and other scenarios where aerosols and certain trace gases are injected into the atmosphere. Such events are considered rare, but may have an extremely high impact, as demonstrated during the European Volcanic Ash Crisis in 2010. Before the 1990s, insufficient monitoring as well as limited data analysis capabilities made it difficult to react to and to prepare for certain rare, high-impact events. Meanwhile, there are many data available during crisis situations, and the data analysis technology has improved significantly. However, there is still a significant gap in the Europe-wide availability of real time hazard measurement and monitoring information for airborne hazards describing “what, where, how much” in 3 dimensions, combined with a near-real-time European data analysis and assimilation system. The main objective of EUNADICS-AV is to close this gap in data and information availability, enabling all stakeholders in the aviation system to obtain fast, coherent and consistent information. This would allow a seamless response on a European scale, including ATM, ATC, airline flight dispatching and individual flight planning. In the SESAR 2020 Programme Execution Framework, EUNADICS-AV is a SESAR Enabling project (project delivering SESAR Technological Solutions). The project aims at passing a SESAR maturity level V2, which includes respective service validation activities, including validation exercises. Work will be also done to prepare a full V3 validation.