The overarching goal of snow_cci is the generation of homogeneous, well calibrated, long-term time series of key snow cover parameters (snow area extent and snow mass) from multi-sensor satellite data for climate applications. A main motivation for this initiative are significant discrepancies in the climatologies, anomalies, and trends in global snow cover time series from different products, detected in the ESA QA4EO Satellite Snow Product Intercomparison and Evaluation project (SnowPEx).

The project started on 17 September 2018. The first phase ended in January 2022. The second phase is planned to start in February 2022 with a duration of 3 years.