Radio occultation profile results obtained from Spire’s CubeSat GNSS-RO constellation

Vladimir
Irisov
Spire Global, Inc.
Timothy Duly, Spire Global, Inc.
Vu Nguyen, Spire Global, Inc.
Dave Ector, Spire Global, Inc.
Chris Rocken, Spire Global, Inc.
Michael Gorbunov, Spire Global, Inc.
Oral
Spire Global, Inc., is a leading player in the nanosatellite sector, and the first to provide commercial, low-cost GNSS-RO measurements to support critical weather data for numerical weather prediction. Spire has ambitious goals of collecting over 100,000 radio occultation profiles per day, providing robust coverage of RO soundings over the entire planet.

Spire recently participated in the first ever commercial weather data pilot (CWDP) program, partnering with NOAA to provide high quality open-loop RO soundings for evaluation of data assimilation into their numerical weather prediction models.

In this talk, we provide an overview of Spire’s ground processing center, showing results from the CWDP, including baseline statistics against models such as GFS and observation penetration depths. We also look ahead toward an exciting era with Spire’s growing constellation of GNSS-RO CubeSats for providing high quality, global, rapidly refreshed RO observations.
OSTS session
Regional and Global CAL/VAL for Assembling a Climate Data Record