NOAA GNSS Radio Occultation Perspective

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NOAA GNSS Radio OccultationPerspective
Gary Davis, Michael Crison, Dave Ector -
NOAA/NESDIS/OSD
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Top New NOAA Satellite Priorities - New
Administration (not in priority order)

• Climate Measurements - Earth radiation budget
• Altimetry - Jason 2 follow on with Eumetsat
• Ocean Scatterometry
• GNSSRO
• Solar Wind
• Ocean Color

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GNSSRO - COSMIC - major success!

• Launched April 2006
• US/Taiwan Collaboration
• US development activities managed by NSF/UCAR
• Very Low cost - 6-70kg microsats (Orbital)
• Provides 1800-2500 worldwide soundings per day
• - very high accuracy temperature profiles 0.1K
• NOAA operational forecasting with the data
  starting May 07
• Very significant positive impacts on forecast
  skill - 8 - 15 hours
• NOAA ground station transition - Fairbanks,
  Wallops, Tromso/Svalbard - April 08
• End of constellation life - 2011
• NOAA cannot afford a data gap

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Current COSMIC Daily Atmospheric/Ionospheric
Soundings
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Proposed Follow-on Capability beyond COSMIC

• NOAA is moving forward on a replacement to COSMIC
  - high priority
• COSMIC 2 (conceptual)
• 12 satellites
• Homogeneous global coverage
• GPS and Galileo signals (minimum)
• Higher gain antennas for lower SNR
• 8000 soundings per day
• 30 minutes data latency - from sounding to data
  delivery to the weather/ionosphere model

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Implementation Alternatives being Studied

• US/Taiwan partnership to launch COSMIC 2
  satellites (like COSMIC)
• US Government and Commercial Secondary payloads -
  integrate payloads into LEO satellites - Decadal
  Survey
• Commercial data buy
• May include combination of options
• Decision point expected in late 2009

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Schedule - National Space Organization (NSPO)
Taiwan GNSS Proposal
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NOAA Exploring Next Step Concepts

• Receiver development - satisfy COSMIC 2 and
  CLARREO requirements
• Block build of a large number of payloads -
  beyond COSMIC 2 core system
• GNSSRO payloads on all viable NASA/NOAA/DoD LEO
  satellites - Decadal Survey recommendation
• Co-locate GNSSRO payloads on platforms with Nadir
  sounders
• Super Sounder concept - optimum sounding
  combinations
• Co-collection of in-track soundings within
  minutes
• Bias correction of non-GNSSRO sounding data -
  using GNSSRO
• Impact of very low latency soundings - ionosphere
  models