Espen Volden
Expert on Climate
GEO Secretariat
Switzerland

Biography
Dr. Espen Volden is an expert on Infrastructure and on Climate within the GEO secretariat, seconded from the European Space Agency. He has more than 20 years of experience in remote sensing and Earth observation as a research scientist, project manager and programme manager. His focus has been on developing applications and services in partnership with users of different categories and from a variety of sectors.

Abstract
Coordinating Earth Observations to Better Understand, Mitigate and Adapt to Climate Change

The Work Programme of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) includes a major climate-dedicated task aiming at sustaining the provision of and facilitating the access to an increasing amount of improved climate data, which is coordinated by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). This coordination effort aims at improving and ensuring sustainability of needed infrastructure, i.e. satellites and in-situ data networks, and of the production of high quality climate data records for the Essential Climate Variables. It further includes extending the historical climate data record by collecting and analyzing proxy observations over the last 2000 years as well as digitizing and archiving of data. It also supports reanalysis and reprocessing efforts in the atmosphere, ocean, land and-sea ice domains at global and regional scale, and the development of coupled reanalysis. Other priorities are fostering advances on seamless prediction, sub-seasonal to seasonal prediction, and polar prediction through the implementation of dedicated international research projects, and improving the representation of organized tropical convection in models and of its interaction with the global circulation. Finally, efforts are made to ensure that this climate information is easily accessible and effectively used. Additionally, several other GEO activities provide climate-relevant information such as the Global Carbon Observation and Analysis System which provides carbon assessment and budgets, and the Global Forest Observation Initiative which supports developing countries in establishing forest monitoring systems to track changes in forest carbon and address REDD+ needs.