Held every three years, ESA’s Living Planet Symposia are among the world’s premier events on Earth observation. The symposia continue to expand in both size and scope. With the climate crisis intensifying, the Living Planet Symposium 2025 (LPS25) emphasises transitioning from ‘observation to climate action and sustainability for Earth’.

The event provides a forum to present and discuss the latest scientific findings and applications based on satellite data, and to review the contribution that data and technologies have made and could further make in addressing environmental and societal challenges. The symposium will showcase innovative products, services, missions and initiatives, with the overarching goal of demonstrating how science, society, policy-making, businesses and the economy can all benefit from observations made from space.

During the five-day event, diverse communities united by a common interest in exploiting Earth observation data will gather together, creating a unique opportunity to meet and network with space enthusiasts from a wide range of sectors.

CMIP at LPS25

CMIP will have a strong presence at LPS25, with ESA as the host of the CMIP IPO. CMIP community members have organised the following sessions.

A.05.04 Advances at the observation-modelling interface

As observations become more sophisticated, and models more complex, so too does the link between them. Rapidly expanding processing and data storage requirements bring new challenges for model evaluation and validation, and the need for tools, toolboxes and cross community collaboration. Novel assimilation techniques, developments in inverse modelling, and improved treatment of combined model-observation uncertainties, require close collaboration between communities.

This session welcomes submissions at the interface of earth observation and modelling. Relevant topics include but are not limited to

1. The role of observations in climate forcings
2. Observational requirements to enable the next generation of CMIP model benchmarking
3. The role of emerging technologies, including machine learning and artificial intelligence, in advancing the assessment of ESMs.
4. Development of toolboxes and metrics for model assessment
5. Novel observations relevant to high resolution model processes
6. Model-observation integration approaches for process understanding

A.05.13 Delivering Sustained Mode Climate Forcings – the Critical Role of Earth Observations

Climate forcings are key in defining external drivers of ongoing climate change and variability. Up-to-date, accurate, and well-documented forcing datasets are needed to build confidence in model simulations, attribution of recent historical changes, and projections of future climate change. High quality earth observations are a critical component of many of the CMIP climate forcing datasets that drive the global model simulations supporting the IPCC, the climate science research community, a large set of operational products as well as a wide range of climate service and downstream users.

With this wide and growing user base, and the resulting increase in the relevance of timely climate information, the CMIP community is working with partners across the globe to develop a pathway to a sustained mode delivery for forcings dataset with regular updates. This will require sustained funding and adequate resource, and support for addressing key scientific challenges such as quantification of uncertainty across the observation-modelling interface.

This agora session will build on the discussions at the Pathway to regular and sustained delivery of climate forcing datasets workshop that took place in October 2024 at ECMWF. A panel of climate forcing dataset providers, earth observation experts and climate service providers will provide an overview of the current and future observational needs, how these needs are being met by the earth observation community and identify the priority scientific and organisational challenges. Together with the audience they will then discuss how to optimise high quality earth observation data to achieve the vision of regular, sustained and robust climate forcing delivery.

Date and time
Wednesday 25th June 2025, 15:30 – 16:15

Room
Nexus Agora

Duration
45 Minutes

Link to session

A.05.15 Rock up and pitch: Observations to support the next generation of climate modelling evaluation

The climate modeling and observation communities share a common goal, to understand and predict climate change and variability.  The increasing resolution and lengthening record of observational data has enabled benchmarking of multiple models with reference data. The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) allows users to compare simulated results across a diversity of models and evaluate model performance against the observed world.

The Rapid Evaluation Framework (REF) is a new CMIP led initiative to improve the availability and access to, evaluated simulations. A first iteration of this project is already underway to support the upcoming IPCC Seventh Assessment Report. This session will explore how planned activities and innovations in Earth observations can be harnessed to support and unlock the next generation of climate model evaluation and benchmarking.

Join us to discover the critical role of Earth observation datasets in advancing the REF.  The session will cover observation requirements and briefings on model evaluation tools, including 2 ESMValTool, and Obs4MIPs expansion to integrate with the REF.  Attendees are invited to pitch ideas to a panel formed of Earth observation and modelling experts.

Presentations and speakers:

Overview of the Rapid Evaluation Framework and the role of Earth observations within it

• Birgit Hassler – German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Model Benchmarking Task Team Co-lead
• Briony Turner – CMIP International Project Office

Observation dataset requirements for model evaluation

• Dora Hegedus – Science and Technology Facilities Council

Participating modelling community diagnostic and performance metric packages

• Birgit Hassler – German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Model Benchmarking Task Team Co-lead

How to get datasets REF ready

• Dora Hegedus – Science and Technology Facilities Council

Date and time
Friday 27th June 2025, 13:45 – 14:30

Room
ESA Agora

Duration
45 Minutes

Link to session

WCRP drop-in and meet up

Come along to the ESA booth on Tuesday between 10:30-11:00 to meet World Climate Research Programme activity members and secretariat, including ESMO Scientific Steering Group members, WGORC members, plus members of the WCRP secretariat and ESMO and CMIP International Project Offices.

Date and time
Tuesday 24th June 2025, 10:00 – 11:30

Room
ESA booth

A.05.09 Presenting WGORC : the new Working Group on Observations for Researching Climate

A new WCRP working group, WGORC, has recently been established under the guidance of the ESMO Scientific steering group in order to address observational data needs for specific climate research cases. This group will collaborate with observational communities, data providers, satellite agencies and other partners in order to address data provision bottlenecks, establish standards, connect various stakeholders, and improve observational data practices across WCRP. By improving dataset curation, identifying gaps, and proposing solutions, WGORC aims to advance Earth System research. This event will serve as an introduction to WGORC’s mission and foster collaborative discussions to drive these objectives forward.

Date and time
Thursday 26th June 2025, 17:45 – 18:30

Room
ESA Agora