Achievement of Radio Occulation From Four GNSS Constellations

Radio Occultations (RO) are well known to provide benefits to forecasting skill with inherent limits due to satellite geometry rather than size - larger satellites can’t necessarily produce more RO per day (above a certain limit), however more satellites can. As such they are a prime candidate for high-value data from a large number of wine-bottle sized satellites. In 2018 the technology scaled to deliver data not just from the GPS constellation (like COSMIC), but also other navigation constellations, including European, Russian and Japanese GNSS. These highly capable nanosatellites will be able to augment the existing global observing system meaningfully with large numbers of RO profiles, but also provide additional data – with GNSS reflectometry for soil moisture and ocean wind speed, microwave sounding for atmospheric moisture, and many more, all of which have already been successfully demonstrated. Cubesats can help public entities to create “weather ready nations” in the face of increasingly extreme weather events