Assessing COSMIC GPS radio occultation derived atmospheric parameters using Australian radiosonde network data

Abstract

Due to the high-uncertainty and high-dynamics of climate and weather changes, the monitoring and forecasting of meteorological conditions have been a challenging task, especially for the southern hemisphere and polar areas where ground-based data are very sparse and only limited meteorological information is available. GPS radio occultation (RO) is an emerging, new and robust Earth atmospheric remote sensing technology and it has overcome many limitations of the conventional meteorological observation techniques. It is critical to analyse the error characteristics of GNSS RO retrievals as a fundamental step for this new research initiative. COSMIC atmospheric products are evaluated extensively by using radiosonde records from 35 Australian and Antarctic weather stations for a period of thirteen months (between July 2006 and July 2007). This analysis is based on a variety of geographical settings (i.e., inland, costal and ocean; three latitude zones). Good agreement between COSMIC profiles and radiosonde measurements is achieved in general and some interesting geo-statistical findings are also identified.