EOPSCLIM
| Project name: | EOPSCLIM - End-to-end Occultation Processing System and Climate Monitoring Service: MetOp GRAS and ACCURATE Integration |
| Project leader: | Gottfried Kirchengast |
| Project team: | Gottfried Kirchengast Susanne Schweitzer (Project manager) Barbara Pirscher Michael Pock Florian Ladstädter Bettina Lackner Irina Thaler Michael Borsche Ulrich Foelsche Andrea Steiner Johannes Fritzer |
| Partners: | International Team Advisors: Bill Kuo (UCAR Boulder, USA) Kent. B. Lauritsen (DMI Copenhagen, DK) Stephen S. Leroy (Harvard University, USA) Christian Retscher (NASA/GSFC, USA) Torsten Schmidt (GFZ Potsdam) Jens Wickert (GFZ Potsdam) sowie Mitglieder des internationalen ACCURATE Team |
| Sponsor: | FFG- ALR (Austrian Research Promotion Agency- Aeronautics and Space Agency) |
Abstract:
The provision of carefully validated radio occultation (RO) climatologies from the new European MetOp satellites (MetOp-A launched in October 2006) is of key interest to climate research, since these RO observations derived from navigation signals of the Global Positioning System (GPS) allow to retrieve fundamental variables of the Earth’s atmosphere (temperature, pressure, humidity) with unprecedented accuracy and consistency. Complementarily, preparing for future occultation systems, the ACCURATE (Atmospheric Climate and Chemistry in the UTLS Region And climate Trends Explorer) mission conceived at the Wegener Center is a next-generation climate mission concept adding greenhouse gas and wind measurement information. Further developing this concept is another key interest for enabling future occultation systems to provide unprecedented benchmark observations of greenhouse gas increases and related climate change.
In this context, the EOPSCLIM project contributed along three main lines:
- validation of MetOp GRAS data with data from other research RO missions as well as ECMWF analyses, and set up of regional climate monitoring based on RO data for IPCC regions,
- advancement of the new ACCURATE infrared laser occultation functionality within the WegCenter’s end-to-end occultation simulator system (“EGOPS”) by aerosol modeling and by a first version of wind profile retrieval processing,
- contribution to the integration of real RO data processing within the EGOPS system, focusing on the new MetOp GRAS data stream.
In addition to its vital contributions to further development of the ACCURATE concept and to MetOp GRAS validation in the framework of the ESA/EUMETSAT MetOp Research Announcement of Opportunity, EOPSCLIM made available, for the first time, RO based regional climate monitoring over the official IPCC regions (about two dozen worldwide land regions in Africa, Europe, Asia, North America, Central and South America, Australia and New Zealand, complemented by polar and oceanic regions). This opens a new avenue of exploiting RO data for regional climate change diagnosis.
