Radio Occultation Data Buy Processing and Product Evaluations

Under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) NESDIS Commercial Data Program (CDP) Radio Occultation Data Buy (RODB) program, the COSMIC Data Analysis and Archive Center (CDAAC) system processes observation data into higher level neutral atmosphere and ionosphere products in near real-time for operational and science user communities. In this presentation we focus on activities over the past year processing data provided by Spire Global and PlanetiQ. We summarize the processing system, data product volumes, and geographic and local time distributions. Neutral atmosphere bending angle profile quality is evaluated by way of comparisons to global numerical weather prediction models and uncertainty estimates obtained from the 3-cornered hat method. We assess ionosphere total electron content (TEC) distributions and describe recent optimizations to enhance TEC track processing. We also compare results obtained from the GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou constellations.