Summary of COSMIC Related Activities

1
Summary of COSMIC Related Activities

• An important objective for COSMIC is operational
  demonstration of GPS radio occultation (RO)
  data.
• A number of organizations are actively performing
  GPS radio occultation data assimilation research
  and impact studies
• UK Met Office
• ECMWF
• Danish Meteorological Institute
• Japan Meteorological Agency
• Central Weather Bureau, Taiwan
• NASA/DAO
• Florida State University
• NCAR/UCAR

2

• There is a big difference between non-real-time
  case studies and operational demonstration.
• Considerable amount of efforts are required to
  prepare for demonstration of GPS RO data in
  operational NWP
• Improving the quality and accuracy of sounding
  retrieval
• Data quality control
• Filtering (or truncating) contaminated data
• Estimating the observational error statistics
• Developing cost-effective and accurate
  observation operators
• Testing of assimilation approaches and strategies
• We need to stimulate and strengthen research
  collaborations.

3

• UCAR hired a junior scientist, Lidia Cucurull, on
  1 March 2003. This is a three-year appointment
  funded by NSF, with the main goal to facilitate
  the operational demonstration of COSMIC data
  through a collaboration between UCAR and the
  Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation.
  Joanna Joiner (NASA/DAO), Jim Yoe (NESDIS), and
  John Derber (NCEP) will jointly supervise this
  position.

4

• There has been a surge of interest from the
  international science community in GPS
  occultation science. GPS Meteorology has been the
  focal point of many recent symposia/workshops
• August 2002 COSMIC workshop, Boulder, CO
• September 2002 OPAC-1 workshop, Graz, Austria
• September 2002 Orsted Conference, Copenhagen,
  Denmark
• January 2003 GPS Meteorology, Tsukuba, Japan
• April 2003 EGS-AGU Meeting, Nice, France
• June 2003 IUGG Meeting, Sapporo, Japan

5

• NESDIS has agreed to host a workshop in the fall
  of 2003, with a goal to enhance technical
  exchange on
• GPS data format (reach agreements among data
  providers)
• GPS data retrieval (comparison of retrieval
  algorithms)
• GPS data assimilation
• The goal is to help prepare for operational
  demonstration
• The National Space Program Office (NSPO) in
  Taiwan is planning a COSMIC Science Workshop in
  the spring of 2004.
• NCAR/UCAR plans to host a Colloquium on GPS
  Meteorology in the summer of 2004. We need to
  entrain more scientists into the field. It is
  important to recognize that GPS Meteorology is
  not taught in most of universities.