GPS Radio Occultation Data


Please note: If you acquire GPS radio occultation data, we ask that you acknowledge us in your use of the data. This may be done by including text such as GPS radio occultation data provided by Research Institute for Sustainable Humanosphere of Kyoto University. We would also appreciate receiving a copy of the relevant publications. Thank you!


This data has been registered in IUGONET (Inter-university Upper atmosphere Global Observation NETwork) metadata database. The IUGONET metadata database will be of great help to researchers in efficiently finding and obtaining ground-based observation data spread over the institutes/universities. Click and visit to the IUGONET website.

IUGONET also prepared the iUgonet Data Analysis Software (UDAS) for the upper atmospheric observation data. If you install the UDAS, you can easily access, download, visualize and analyze the MU radar observation data through the Internet. Please click and try to use the UDAS.


Go to COSMIC FSI Data  
Go to CHAMP FSI Data  

Brief description of archived data

The Global Positioning System (GPS) radio occultation (GPS-RO) technique is an active limb sounding observation of the Earth's atmosphere using a GPS receiver onboard a low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite. Since the observation data taken by such technique have high accuracy and excellent height resolution, they are very useful for analyzing atmospheric structures including small-scale vertical fluctuations in the troposphere and stratosphere. The vertical resolution of the geometrical optics (GO) method [Kursinski et al., 1996] in the stratosphere is about 1.5 km due to Fresnel radius limitations, but full spectrum inversion (FSI) [Jensen et al., 2003] can provide superior resolutions. The archived GPS-RO data have been calculated applying FSI to COSMIC GPS-RO profiles in an altitude from ground level up to 30 km. The original COSMIC GPS-RO profiles are open on the UCAR homewebpage (http://cdaac-www.cosmic.ucar.edu/cdaac/products.html#cosmic). The height resolution of archived data is 0.1 km and we averaged the original RISHANA data (refractivity, pressure, temperature, and tangential point of latitude and longitude) in a bin of +/-0.05 km for nominal height. If you want to know details of data description and FSI, please refer to the paper [Tsuda et al., 2011].

Reference

1. Tsuda, T, X. Lin, H. Hayashi, and Noersomadi, Analysis of vertical wave number spectrum of atmospheric gravity waves in the stratosphere using COSMIC GPS radio occultation data, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 4, 1627 - 1636, doi:10.5194/amt-4-1627-2011, 2011.
2. Kursinski, E., G. Hajj, , W. I. Bertiger, S. S. Leroy, T. Meehan, L. Romans, J. Schofield, D. McCleese, W. Melbourne, C. Thornton, T. Yunck, J. Eyre, and R. Nagatani: Initial results of radiooccultation observations of Earth's atmosphere using the Global Positioning System, Science, 271, 1107 - 1110, 1996.
3. Jensen, A. S., M. S. Lohmann, H.-H. Benzon, and A. S. Nielsen, Full Spectrum Inversion of radio occultation signals, Radio Sci., 38, 1040, doi:10.1029/2002RS002763, 2003.


Figure 1. Movie of height-latitude plot of zonal-mean dry air temperature
in 2009. There can be seen a sudden enhancement of temperature in the
stratosphere (24-40 km) in the northern hemisphere (> 60 degrees N)
associated with SSW on January 23, 2009.

Information of archived file name:
NetCDF (network Common Data Format) data are available, and contains physical parameters such as dry pressure, dry temperature,
refractivity, bending angle, impact parameter, etc as a function of mean sea level altitude of perigee point.
File names of netCDF data are composed of RISHANA_YYYY.DDD.nc.

YYYY: Year
DDD: Day of year

Variables:

event

z

gpsid

leoid

time

lat

lon

ref

pres

temp

tan_lat

tan_lon


COSMIC FSI Data

[Metadata]

[Numerical data and plots]


CHAMP FSI Data

[Metadata]

[Numerical data and plots]


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Created: 2017-07-11 18:08:25 +0900


RISH Metadata Management Group
Research Institute for Sustainable Humanosphere (RISH), Kyoto University
Gokasho, Uji, Kyoto 611-0011, Japan
E-mail: iugonet (at) rish.kyoto-u.ac.jp