OPSCLIMTRACE
Project name: | OPSCLIMTRACE – Occultation Processing System for Cal/Val and Climate: Advanced Key Algorithms and SI-traceable Processing |
Project leader: | Gottfried Kirchengast |
Projekt team: | Johannes Fritzer (Senior Scientist) Andrea Steiner (Senior Sci. Adviser) |
Partners: | EUMETSAT, AIUB Berne, DLR Oberpfaffenhofen, TU Graz, DMI Copenhagen, ECMWF Reading, POLITO Torino, UCAR Boulder, RMIT MelbourneEUMETSAT, GeoOptics Inc. |
Sponsor: | FFG- ALR (Austrian Research Promotion Agency- Austrian Aeronautics and Space Agency); ASAP - 10 Programme |
Duration: | Jun. 2014 - Oct. 2016 |
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. 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. The new Reference Occultation Processing System OPS, a cornerstone development at the Wegener Center over 2011 to 2015, aims to realize this full chain from RO raw data to ECVs with integrated uncertainty propagation. The OPSCLIMTRACE project, complementing the ASAP-9 project OPSCLIMPROP, helps to complete the OPS with three new key algorithms essential for an unprecedented quality of the long-term RO data and will carry out an SI-traceable re-processing of the full RO data record 2001-2015 and an associated validation. This will result in the first-time availability of an SI-traceable RO data record, including uncertainty estimation at all data product levels, which is expected to outperform any current RO record and to provide a novel reference standard.
