The European Space Agency Soil Moisture Climate Change Initiative (Soil_Moisture_cci) project is part of the ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI) programme, which aims to produce datasets of Essential Climate Variables (ECV's) from satellite datasets.

The Soil Moisture CCI project was set up to :
- Analyse the needs of the climate research community in terms of soil moisture data.
- Adapt soil moisture satellite measurements for their use by the climate research community.
- Create a long-term consistent soil moisture time series, based on active and passive data, suitable for climate change studies.