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 first phase of the project started in September 2018; the second phase started in February 2022. The third phase of the snow_cci project is planned to start in late 2025.