EOPSCLIM - End-to-End Occultation Processing System and Climate Monitoring Service: MetOp GRAS and ACCURATE Integration

The provision of carefully validated radio occultation (RO) clima - tologies 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 fundamen - tal 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/Uni Graz is a next-generation climate mission concept adding greenhouse gas and wind measurement information (see the ACCURAID project overview for more information).

Further developing this concept is of key interest to enable future occultation systems to provide unprecedented benchmark observations of greenhouse gas increases and related climate change.

In this context, the EOPSCLIM project contributes to research along three main lines: 

1. Validation of MetOp GRAS data by using 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.
2. 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.
3. 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 Announce - ment of Opportunity, EOPSCLIM , for the first time, makes available RO based regional climate monitoring over the official IPCC regions (about two dozen land regions world-wide 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.

Coordinator

Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change University of Graz - Prof. Gottfried Kirchengast

Partners

• GNSS Atmosphere Sounding Group, GFZ Potsdam, Germany - Dr. Jens Wickert
• Meteorological Division, EUMETSAT Darmstadt, Germany - Dr. Axel von Engeln
• COSMIC Project Office, UCAR Boulder, CO, U.S.A. - Dr. Bill Kuo
• Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Greenbelt, MD, USA - Dr. Christian Retscher

Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change, University of Graz
Prof. Gottfried Kirchengast
Leechgasse 25
A-8010 Graz
E-mail: gottfried.kirchengast@uni-graz.at