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COSMIC/FORMOSAT

The Validation of FORMOSAT-7/ COSMIC-2 Space Weather Products and their Applications
Chi-Yen Lin, National Central University

The FORMOSAT-7/COSMIC-2 (F7/C2) satellite mission provides thousands of daily radio occultation (RO) soundings in the low-latitude and midlatitude regions. This study presents ionosphere products from the innovative satellite constellation mission. Global ionospheric specification (GIS) is an ionospheric data product based on the Gauss-Markov Kalman filter, assimilating the ground-based Global Positioning System and space-based F7/C2 RO observations, providing hourly continuous global 3D electron density distribution. The Ne-aided Abel inversion implements 4D climatological electron density constructed from previous RO observations, which provides altitudinal information on the horizontal gradient to reduce the retrieval error due to the spherical symmetry assumption of the Abel inversion. Detailed validation of standard Abel inversion, Ne-aided Abel inversion, and GIS are carried out using manually scaled digisonde NmF2 (F2 layer peak density), yielding correlation coefficients of 0.885 for both Abel inversions and 0.903 for GIS. The hmF2 (F2 layer peak height) validation of both Abel inversion and GIS yields correlation coefficients of 0.885 and 0.862. The comparisons illustrate the climatological structures are consistent above 300 km altitude. Furthermore, both the Abel electron density profiles and GIS detect electron density variations during a minor geomagnetic storm, and GIS can further reconstruct the variation of equatorial ionization anomaly crests. This study also presents the applications of GIS for space science study. The validations and comparisons confirm that these two data products are reliable for studying ionosphere climatology and weather. They are operationally produced and released at Taiwan Analysis Center for COSMIC.

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