Terms and Conditions

Terms and Conditions of data usage, and Personal Data Privacy Policy Statement

The Essential Climate Variable Soil Moisture (ESA CCI SM) product was initiated within the Water Cycle Multi-mission Observation Strategy (WACMOS) project inside ESA's Support To Science Element programme, and is now being continued and refined in the context of the Climate Change Initiative (CCI).

The ESA CCI Soil Moisture project kindly requests that data users follow the Terms and Conditions as set out in the following:

Registration. Users of the ESA CCI SM product are required to register before being able to download product. Registration is required to deter automated systems having direct access to the product. Data downloaded by the registered user can be used by the user and the associated organisation, no onward distribution is permitted.

Scientific use only. The ESA CCI SM product is intended for scientific purposes only.

No onward distribution. Re-export or transfer of the original data (as received from the ESA CCI SM sftp) by the data users to a third party is prohibited. This is in the best interest of both the individual data providers and the potential users as unrestricted copying of the original data by multiple, independent users may lead to errors in the data.

Intellectual Property Rights. User acknowledges the respective data owner's full title and ownership of the data and nothing in these terms and conditions shall be construed as granting or implying any rights to, or interest in copyrights or intellectual property rights of the respective data owners.

Acknowledgement and citation. Whenever the product, made available by the ESA CCI SM project, is used for publication, the data's origin (i.e. the ESA CCI SM project) must be acknowledged and referenced.

The data set should be cited using the complete three references as follows:

  1. Gruber, A., Scanlon, T., van der Schalie, R., Wagner, W., Dorigo, W. (2019) Evolution of the CCI Soil Moisture Climate Data Records and their underlying merging methodology. Earth System Science Data 11, 717-739. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-11-717-2019 
  2. Dorigo, W.A., Wagner, W., Albergel, C., Albrecht, F., Balsamo, G., Brocca, L., Chung, D., Ertl, M., Forkel, M., Gruber, A., Haas, E., Hamer, D. P. Hirschi, M., Ikonen, J., De Jeu, R. Kidd, R. Lahoz, W., Liu, Y.Y., Miralles, D., Lecomte, P. (2017). ESA CCI Soil Moisture for improved Earth system understanding: State-of-the art and future directions. In Remote Sensing of Environment, 2017, ISSN 0034-4257, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2017.07.001.
  3. (compulsory if using the COMBINED product) Preimesberger, W., Scanlon, T., Su,  C. -H., Gruber, A. and Dorigo, W. (2021). Homogenization of Structural Breaks in the Global ESA CCI Soil Moisture Multisatellite Climate Data Record, in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, vol. 59, no. 4, pp. 2845-2862, April 2021, doi: 10.1109/TGRS.2020.3012896.

User feedback. Use feedback is warmly welcomed and encouraged. All questions and remarks concerning the product can be addressed to CCI_SM_CONTACT@EODC.EU.

No warranties. The product distributed from the ESA CCI SM project are provided for free and "as is", i.e. without any warranty as to their condition or consistency or suitability for a particular purpose. Neither the EODC, nor ESA, can be held responsible for any errors or inconsistencies in the data provided.

Personal Data Privacy Policy Statement

The only personal data that is collected by the project is the data that you provide via the user registration. Your personal data is collected by the project to perform user validation i.e. to deter automated systems having direct access to the product, for statistical analysis and correspondence purposes only.

The project will retain your e-mail address in order to provide you with newsletters and information about product updates and information that may be of interest related to the soil moisture thematic (i.e. information about workshops on soil moisture).

Your e-mail address may be included in broadcast e-mails to all registered data set users, but your e-mail address will not be visible to other recipients of these e-mails.

The other registration information you provide is used for statistical analysis of the anonymised profiles of the product users.

To the best of the projects ability the data you provide is stored securely and is only provided to a third party, outside the project team, to facilitate the distribution of product related newsletters. To the best of the projects ability the third party solutions for broadcast e-mails are only engaged if they offer compliance with EU, or US, data privacy and protection legislation, including, if appropriate, the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework.

A copy of the information that you provided, and that is held by the project, may be requested by contacting the project team.

The project is willing to cooperate fully with EU Data Protection authorities concerning the personal data that it collects and stores.

By registering to access the product and providing your personal data you agree to this usage as described in this personal data privacy policy statement.