The ESA Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) Climate Change Initiative project is part of the European Space Agency's Climate Change Initiative programme. It aims to provide data products that are specifically adapted to climate applications (i.e. include information on accuracy and uncertainty within the data). Furthermore, this project will explore the need to improve the performance of current SSS algorithm retrievals and directly contribute to climate science studies submitted to the next International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Annual Review for climate change in 2020.