The Earth Observation for Surface Mass Balance (EO4SMB) study addresses Theme 4 of ESA’s POLAR+ call, and forms part of ESA’s Polar Science Cluster of projects. The aim of EO4SMB is to investigate the feasibility of measuring ice sheet Surface Mass Balance from space. The study will focus primarily on exploiting measurements from ESA’s ice mission, CryoSat-2, to derive a portfolio of SMB parameters covering the period 2010-2020. The study will focus on developing, validating and interpreting measurements at three test sites in Greenland, producing a proof-of-concept prototype SMB product, and undertaking several science use cases. Alongside this core activity, two exploratory techniques to leverage more information from satellite measurements will be developed; firstly by combining altimetry measurements with gravimetry data, and secondly by exploring the potential of Deep Learning to extract additional information from the CryoSat-2 satellite data.