Introducing the DISC

The Earth Cloud, Aerosol and Radiation Explorer (EarthCARE) mission was launched in May 2024. Following a successful commissioning phase, the mission became fully operational in January 2025. At this point, the Data, Innovation and Science Cluster (DISC) became responsible for ensuring that users get the best quality products.

The DISC is an international consortium of experts who support ESA in ensuring that the different EarthCARE data products are of the highest quality as part of the data user quality framework. Many consortium members were also involved in the development of the mission and its products. Therefore, the DISC is critical to ensuring we get the best possible insight into clouds, aerosols, and radiation. You can find out more about DISC's role in EarthCARE and why it is important in this article.

DISC Activities

To meet its aim, the EarthCARE DISC carries out several tasks to make use of its expertise in products, algorithms, and instruments.

The DISC tasks are:

1. Onboarding during Commissioning Phase
2. Processor Evolution
3. Instrument Calibration and Monitoring Facility
4. Anomaly and Configuration Management
5. Level 2 Test Bed Evolution and Maintenance
6. Quality Control and Calibration/Validation
7. Assimilation and data quality monitoring in Numerical Weather Prediction models
8. Quality Working Group support
9. Support to Reprocessing Campaigns
10. User Support
11. EarthCARE Multi-mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform (MAAP) initiative support
12. Project Outreach and Communication

To successfully achieve all these tasks, the team has been organised into several Expert Centres, as shown in the following image. This article provides an introduction to the leaders of the EarthCARE DISC team, which includes the Management team, Expert Centre Leads, and Task Leads. The EarthCARE Level 2 Algorithm Developers, Scientific Working Groups, and Quality Working Group are featured on the Meet the Team page of the EarthCARE Science website.

The EarthCARE DISC contract kicked off in September 2024, three months after launch. The contract began with a three-month onboarding stage, which coincided with the final three months of the commissioning phase (E1). The DISC team successfully took over from the commissioning phase teams for the EarthCARE operations phase (E2) in January 2025.

The DISC successfully supported the release of the Level-1 data products in January 2025. In March 2025 the DISC supported the release of the single-sensor Level-2a and two-sensor Level-2b products, passing the contract’s first Public Release Review.

The EarthCARE DISC project is funded by ESA through contract No. 4000144997/24/I-NS.

DISC Consortium

The EarthCARE DISC consists of 17 organisations, from nine countries, and is led by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut, KNMI). The organisations involved are listed alphabetically in the table below.