Evaluation of GNSS Radio Occultation Profiles in the Vicinity of Atmospheric Rivers

Increasing the density of Global Navigation Satellite System radio occultation (RO) with commercial Smallsats and the next generation COSMIC-2 constellation is expected to improve analyses of the state of atmosphere, which is essential for numerical weather prediction. High vertical resolution RO profiles could be useful to observe atmospheric rivers (ARs) over the ocean, which transport water vapor in shallow, elongated corridors that frequently impact the west coasts of continents. The multi-year AR Reconnaissance campaign has extensively sampled ARs over the northeastern Pacific with dropsondes, providing an invaluable dataset to evaluate the reliability of RO retrievals. These dropsondes, and a reanalysis product that assimilates them, are compared to three RO datasets: (1) established operational missions, (2) COSMIC-2, and (3) the commercial Spire constellation. Each RO dataset has biases relative to reanalyses of less than 0.5% N in the upper troposphere and negative biases in the lower troposphere. Direct colocations with dropsondes indicate that vertical refractivity gradients present within ARs may be contributing to negative biases at higher altitudes inside than outside ARs, where the greatest variability and vertical gradients are at the well-defined boundary layer top. Observations from Spire are overly smooth, affecting the ability to resolve the low-level structure of an AR. Surprisingly, the depth of penetration into the lower troposphere is greater inside an AR than outside for all datasets. The results indicate that the observation errors used for assimilation of RO within ARs should consider the height dependent biases that are associated with the structure of the atmosphere.

Automated summary

Increasing the density of Global Navigation Satellite System radio occultation with commercial Smallsats and the next generation COSMIC-2 constellation is expected to improve atmospheric state analysis for numerical weather prediction. The study compares different datasets of radio occultation with dropsonde observations and reanalysis products. The results show biases in the radio occultation datasets compared to the reanalysis, particularly in the vertical refractivity gradients within atmospheric rivers. Observations from the commercial Spire constellation are found to be overly smooth and affect the resolution of the low-level structure of atmospheric rivers.