NEWCLIM

Abstract:

Monitoring the atmosphere to gain accurate and long-term stable records of essential climate variables (ECVs) such as temperature is the backbone of atmospheric and climate science and observation from space is the key to obtain such data globally in Earth’s atmosphere. GPS radio occultation (RO) provides a unique tool for such monitoring in the free atmosphere as it enables to tie RO-derived ECVs and their uncertainty—in particular temperature and pressure—to fundamental time standards and to their unique long-term stability and narrow uncertainty.

Mainly within the ASAP-9 and ASAP-10 projects OPSCLIMPROP and OPSCLIMTRACE, the Wegener Center currently develops a new Reference Occultation Processing System OPS that realizes this full chain from RO raw data to ECVs with integrated uncertainty propagation and that will have a first re-processing data record 2001-2015 available by end 2015. The OPSCLIMVALUE project will quantitatively evaluate the quality of these novel OPS re-processing data, including of key value-added products and of the integrated uncertainty estimates, in order to establish to what degree the new RO data record outperforms current records and to check the reliability of the new uncertainty estimates.

This will result in the first-time availability of a carefully validated SI-traceable RO data record, including evaluation of uncertainty estimates and of value-added products of high climate science utility, for the benefit of calibration/validation and climate applications.