Empirical model of the ionosphere based on COSMIC/FORMOSAT-3 for neutral atmosphere radio occultation processing

Abstract. The Radio Occultation instrument at the upcoming EUMETSAT Polar System – Second Generation (EPS-SG) mission will be devoted primarily to monitor the neutral atmosphere through this payload, consisting of a GNSS receiver and occultation antennae pointing slightly below the Earth's limb. The resulting data will be processed by EUMETSAT (primarily for L1B data) and by the ROMSAF's Radio Occultation Processing Package (ROPP) software to obtain the vertical profiles of temperature, pressure and other relevant level 2 parameters of the neutral atmosphere. Newer versions of this software might include a feature by which empirical models of the ionosphere (i.e. vertical profiles of electron density) can be included in the processing in order to increase the accuracy of the inverted bending angle profiles. In order to test this new feature, this work includes the efforts that have been made in order to provide an empirical model of the ionosphere purely based on vertical profiles of electron density inverted from data of previous radio occultation (RO) missions (i.e. COSMIC/FORMOSAT-3). The methodology used in this work is based on using the separability hypothesis, to overcome the spherical symmetry assumption of the Abel inversion as well as a new mechanization of the inversion process, based on a joint processing of all the occultation data via a linear mean square filter, rather than adopting the classical peel onion approach. Additionally, with the development of this empirical model, efforts have been made to construct a proxy index for scintillation monitoring based on the inverted profiles (Occultation Scintillation Proxy Index or OSPI), which shows reasonable correlation with the amplitude scintillation index S₄.