Effective Coverage and Refresh Considerations for Future Space Weather Radio Occultation Systems

Radio occultation (RO) systems such as the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate (COSMIC-2) mission are frequently characterized by the number of occultations, either tropospheric or ionospheric or both, that they can deliver for operational or science users. However, the geographic distribution of such observations is not uniform and random, but depends on the orbital and sensor accommodation details of the low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites hosting the RO sensors as well as the orbits of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) that transmit the signals observed by the RO sensors. In addition, certain space weather applications (e.g., near real time specification of equatorial scintillation) require regionally distributed observations, not global data sets. Other factors, such as sensor duty cycling, sometimes necessary for CubeSat hosted RO sensors, and data latency and its connection to satellite ground stations, can also affect the amount of useful data that an RO system can provide. We will discuss effective data coverage and refresh considerations relevant to future RO systems.