Editorial: Towards 2030: a remote sensing perspective on achieving sustainable development goal 13 – climate action

Climate change is already here, and we can see its impacts on the news more often than we would like to. Therefore, it is no wonder that people are demanding more actions to stop the warming trend and steer our trajectory toward a calmer future. However, sustainable action must be based on robust and trustworthy data to avoid jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. This motivated us to address the 13th Sustainable Development Goal: Climate Action–Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. Specifically, we focused on how studies of atmospheric remote sensing could help us understand how to reverse the course of climate change, and how to reduce and minimize its impact on the population, their livelihood, and nature. It can be argued that enough is already known about the physical basis of climate change and therefore, researchers should move their focus on supporting climate action with the data they produce. However, not everything is known—at least not accurately enough. Satellite data sets have sampling issues and biases that still need to be resolved (e.g., Chung et al., 2024; Magruder et al., 2024). Moreover, the modelling community is moving forward to regional analyses with high-resolution models, thus more detailed observations are needed for the development and validation of these new models. In addition, remote sensing data records are approaching climate-relevant time scales and offering invaluable information on the changes already caused by climate change. With novel algorithms and machine learning methods even more could be learned from these long data series. Furthermore, people’s behavior and their emissions are constantly changing, thus accurate monitoring is needed also in the future. Especially, as the global average temperature will rise above 1.5°C which will take us to uncharted territory with an increasing possibility for abrupt changes and crossing of tipping points. Consequently, new and refined satellite retrievals will likely lead to new understanding and better support for climate action. This new and improved information will also be a crucial part of the seventh IPCC Assessment Report which is planned to be released in 2029. To address the above-mentioned needs, this Research Topic includes six originalresearch articles. All of them present novel methods and/or new atmospheric satellite products which will be beneficial for the scientific community and society at large.