ESA Living Planet Symposium 2025

With the escalating climate crisis, the 2025 Living Planet Symposium (LPS25) focuses on advancing from ‘observation to climate action and sustainability for Earth.’ The symposium will spotlight cutting-edge products, services, missions, and initiatives, aiming to demonstrate the benefits that Earth observation brings to science, society, policy-making, business, and the economy.

ESMO will be holding two sessions during the Symposium:

• A.05.08 Emerging ESM technologies and their implications for observations

Conveners: Bimochan Niraula, Fanny Adloff, Claire Macintosh, Jörg Schulz, Simon Pinnock

New and emerging technologies are increasingly impacting all methods of operation in climate science. Advanced modelling efforts seeking to represent the global Earth system in ever finer detail are targeting cloud-resolving, km-scale resolutions. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence approaches are now often integrated into Earth System Models and used in the handling of the data outputs. Increasingly complex atmospheric, land surface and biogeochemical processes are being implemented across the Earth System Modelling landscape, and require new observational data streams. These shifts in ESM technologies affect the observational community in several ways. The trend towards increased resolution and more complex process representation has implications for observations that are required to initialise, evaluate, and develop traditional ESMs. New data requirements for training, validating, and critically assessing biases in AI models and model emulators are increasingly incorporating a diverse range of Earth Observation (EO) data. Further, improvements in model processes will help improve the efficacy of observations and identify ideal targets for the next generation of observation platforms and the re-evaluation of existing mission data. In this session, we seek to invite speakers that can describe the implications of emerging ESM technologies for observations and how we can ensure better model-observation integration in this context.

• A.05.09 Emerging Earth Observation capabilities: new developments and implications for Earth System Modelling

Conveners: Claire Macintosh, Michael Eisinger, Thorsten Fehr, Alex Hoffmann, Thomas August, Bjoern Frommknecht, Kotska Wallace

Earth Observation Research missions are designed to engineer step changes in our understanding of the processes governing our changing climate, with a major result that they can be modelled with better reliability in climate and Earth system models (ESMs). These models are in turn the key component by which we understand and develop projections and forecasts. The legacy of such research missions thus substantially outlives the original mission duration.

This session seeks to explore pathways to maximally exploit new and upcoming Earth Observation missions and capabilities, for the development of Earth System Modelling, including (but not limited to):

•       Novel observations relevant to high resolution model processes
•       Development of model observation simulators
•       Process studies in ESMs based on novel observations
•       Earth system model use case development for upcoming or proposed missions
•       Newly reprocessed data or heritage missions for process understanding.