The modelling community achieved steady progress in dynamical climate prediction using Earth System models and the last decade has seen an accelerated development for the land surface component. This has led to predictions that are now considered useful for some societal applications over “hot-spot” land areas such as the Euro-Mediterranean. However, forecasts performance over land is still substantially weaker compared with ocean, due to the lack of observations, which has hampered the development of well-constrained land processes models. While benefiting from daily verification, the models used for the prediction of the short time-scales (from weather to seasons) include only that part of the surface variability for which observations are available and that can be modeled/initialized to positively contribute to the forecasts (verification-based approach). As a consequence, they unavoidably lack some processes such as those related to ecosystems and their variability. On the other hand, longer time-scales (interannual to centennial) models used for climate variability/change research contain comprehensive vegetation and soil schemes intended to represent as many processes as possible, even those that are still poorly constrained or understood. Through the synergy between process-based and verification-based approaches the ambitious objective of this project is to obtain a practicable seamless development across scales of the land modelling applied to Earth System predictions. The main goal will be to obtain verifiable land processes models to enhance the performance of the predictions across scales and to demonstrate unprecedented useful applications for the energy sector. A fundamental contribution to fill in the gap between short- and long-term Earth System predictions will come from the emerging availability of reliable land surface observations from remotely sensed satellite campaigns that will provide novel observational constraints to land processes models.

The Greek island of Antikythera, whose name is linked to the history of science, is being transformed into a state-of-the-art climate observatory and a pioneer station for climate and weather research in the Mediterranean. The National Observatory of Athens (NOA), is building the Panhellenic Geophysical Observatory of Antikythera (PANGEA), a large remote sensing infrastructure, leveraging on a strategic investment of the European Investment Bank. The Mediterranean is one of the most climate-sensitive areas on the planet, and the observatory will fill a very important geographical gap in research on climate change and its implications. NOA holds significant expertise in Earth Observation to fulfil this mission, but it lacks scientific background in key areas of remote sensing and radiative transfer theory and applications, along with certain technological background. The PANGEA4CalVal Twinning project aspires to fill these gaps, by building upon PANGEA a framework of knowledge, R&I and management capacity, to establish a Centre for Earth Observation (EO) and satellite Calibration/Validation (Cal/Val) in the Mediterranean region. The project will enhance the human capacity and R&I growth in the region, towards supporting frontier environmental and climate research. PANGEA4CalVal is timely, to address the tremendous evolution of EO in both technology and application domains, the advent of the so-called “New Space” paradigm, along with the additional needs for satellite Cal/Val and enhancement of Copernicus Services. The project will apply a comprehensive set of activities to transfer know-how from advanced partners in Europe, aiming to fill the identified knowledge gaps and fulfil the project objectives. PANGEA4CalVal will develop an open-access framework for PANGEA, with the mandate to bring together academia, industry, regional authorities and the civil society, to transform R&I capacities into socio-economic benefits for the region and the EU.