A Preliminary Investigation of GNSS Radio Occultation and its Applications in Australian Meteorology

Erjiang Fu, Kefei Zhang and Falin Wu

Abstract:	Since the first low earth orbit (LEO) satellite equipped with a GPS receiver was launched in early 1990s, there are more than a dozen of GPS receivers onboard LEO satellites for Earth atmospheric observation. Thousands of daily global distributed GPS radio occultation (RO) events have been captured by these LEOs. Recent research has shown great potentials of the GNSS RO derived atmospheric profiles for meteorological studies since it can overcome the limitations of existing atmospheric observation methods. To fully exploit the usability of this emerging technology in Australia, it is critical to analyse the error characteristics of the GNSS RO retrievals for an optimal solution of assimilating this new data source into current meteorological framework. This paper presents a comprehensive comparison between COSMIC retrieved atmospheric profiles and radiosonde measurements using 42 collocated stations in Australian region. Statistical results show that the average temperature difference is about 0.05°C with a standard deviation of 1.52°C and the average pressure difference is -1.06hPa with a standard deviation of 0.91hPa. It has demonstrated that the GNSS RO derived atmospheric profiles have good agreements with radiosonde observations.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 20th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2007) September 25 - 28, 2007 Fort Worth Convention Center Fort Worth, TX
Pages:	1777 - 1781
Cite this article:	Fu, Erjiang, Zhang, Kefei, Wu, Falin, "A Preliminary Investigation of GNSS Radio Occultation and its Applications in Australian Meteorology," Proceedings of the 20th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2007), Fort Worth, TX, September 2007, pp. 1777-1781.
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