---
id: articles/c3s-making-climate-data-visible
about:
  label: 'C3S behind the scenes: making climate data visible'
  description: >-
    Essay by a climate data visualiser at the Copernicus Climate Change Service
    (ECMWF) on how the charts in its climate bulletins and reports are made,
    from daily variable tracking to the final graphic.
  tags:
    - data visualisation
    - climate
    - charts
    - communication
    - Copernicus
article:
  url: 'https://climate.copernicus.eu/c3s-behind-scenes-making-climate-data-visible'
  published: '2026-09-23'
  publisher: Copernicus Climate Change Service (ECMWF)
domains:
  - climate
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: 'C3S behind the scenes: making climate data visible'
      url: >-
        https://climate.copernicus.eu/c3s-behind-scenes-making-climate-data-visible
    - title: The role of data visualisation in the European State of the Climate 2024
      url: >-
        https://climate.copernicus.eu/role-data-visualisation-european-state-climate-2024
  created: '2026-10-19'
  reviewed: '2026-10-19'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed; neither page names the author'
  status: draft
---
A first-person account, published on the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) site on 23 September 2026, by someone who has spent three years as the service's climate data visualiser at ECMWF. The graphics described feed the C3S Monthly Climate Bulletins, the Global Climate Highlights and the European State of the Climate (ESOTC) reports.

The essay walks through how a chart gets made. The service tracks variables such as air temperature, soil moisture, sea surface temperature, precipitation and sea ice extent every day. The visualiser then tries several chart types, colour palettes and levels of detail, and keeps talking with the scientists until the graphic says one clear thing. Two examples are given: an infographic of glacier loss in the Alps for ESOTC 2024, made with glacier experts at the University of Zurich and WGMS, and a stacked bar chart showing that every day of 2023, 2024 and 2025 was more than 1 °C above pre-industrial levels. A ridgeline plot of global daily temperature anomalies, published in the Global Climate Highlights report in January 2026, was widely shared by journalists and policy makers.

A companion piece on the ESOTC 2024 report describes the production rules: style guidelines set at the start of drafting, labels and annotations so each chart stands alone when shared, several rounds of review with scientists, responsive charts for mobile, and a graphics gallery of about 130 images with one-click downloads of the processed data behind each one. The glacier map was drawn in QGIS and finished in Adobe Illustrator.

The essay closes with Visualising Climate, a conference on climate and environmental data visualisation co-hosted by Copernicus and ECMWF in Bologna on 4 to 6 November 2026. In this wiki the piece sits at the [presentation](/presentation/) layer: it is about how a model's output becomes something a reader can take in, not about the models themselves.