The Role of Radio Occultation in Global High-Resolution Weather Models

The COSMIC Program, Spire and other companies are developing constellations of Radio Occultation satellites. These observing platforms bring highly detailed soundings of temperature and moisture over the Earth. In addition, the new generation of geostationary satellites, such as the US GOES 16, sample the whole Earth disk four times an hour at infrared resolutions of 2 km. The availability of detailed dynamic information, along with clouds, can enable a non-hydrostatic models and global weather prediction at high spatial resolution, 5 km and denser in the horizontal. These models have proven to be valuable for public safety by having skill in the most dangerous of storms such as flash floods. They also will enable a wide variety of new applications for improved weather information.