UK Earth Observation Climate Information Service (EOCIS)

The UK Earth Observation Climate Information Service (EOCIS) turns observations from environmental sensors in orbit into open climate data records and climate information for science, decision-making and business. It is a collaboration of 11 universities and four national research centres, led by the National Centre for Earth Observation and funded through the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). It launched in March 2023, and its funded project phase ran to March 2025.

EOCIS datasets cover land, sea and lake surface temperature, ocean colour (chlorophyll-a), aerosols and particulate matter, cloud properties, methane, carbon monoxide, water vapour profiles, active fires and fire radiative power, Arctic sea ice thickness, ice-sheet elevation change and mass balance, and root-zone soil moisture for Africa. Inputs include Sentinel-3 SLSTR and OLCI, Sentinel-2 MSI, Landsat 8/9 TIRS, VIIRS, the ATSR series, AVHRR, IASI on MetOp, GOSAT and CryoSat-2. Several records start in the 1980s or 1990s, and the temperature records carry per-pixel uncertainty estimates. A Climate High Resolution UK (CHUK) strand builds datasets on a common 100 m British National Grid, such as lake catchment water-quality indicators and daily land surface temperature from Landsat 8/9.

The data are free to use, mostly under CC-BY 4.0 or the Open Government Licence. Most datasets are archived at CEDA, and others are obtained via CPOM, TAMSAT or the Copernicus Climate Data Store. Most come with quick start guides, though some are still marked as coming soon. A web portal offers global and UK data viewers, a climate dashboard and STAC-based access with example Python notebooks.