34,000 more soundings per day by 2018

[Amped]

http://gpsworld.com/planetiq-signs-weather-satellite-launch-contract-with-indias-antrix/

 

 

PlanetiQ has signed a contract with Antrix Corporation Limited, the commercial arm of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), for the launch of PlanetiQ’s first two weather satellites on a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) during the fourth quarter of 2016.

Ten more satellites are planned for launch in 2017 to complete an initial set of 12 satellites that will dramatically improve global weather forecasting, climate monitoring and space weather prediction, and enable advanced analytics for numerous industries worldwide.

 

 

Each of PlanetiQ’s 10-kilogram microsatellites will fly PlanetiQ’s Pyxis-RO sensor, an advanced satellite weather sensor in a small package that can penetrate through clouds and storms down to the Earth’s surface. Pyxis-RO uses a technique called radio occultation to track the bending of GPS and other signals as they travel through Earth’s atmosphere, and then converts the bending angle into high-precision measurements of global temperature, pressure and water vapor in the atmosphere, and electron density in the ionosphere.

Each occultation is a vertical profile of atmospheric data with high vertical resolution, comprised of measurements less than every 200 meters from the Earth’s surface up into the ionosphere. The data is similar to that collected by weather balloons, but more accurate, more frequent and on a global scale.

 

 

Anyone have thoughts on this?  I know GPS RO is more accurate than other used  satellite based solutions, but I have my doubts that the new generation is more accurate than a weather balloon.

 

Also FYI there have been several other companies that have been planning to build similar sensors and launch them but haven't been able to get government funding. PlanetIQ finally had to contract with a private company from India.

[sparkync]

http://gpsworld.com/planetiq-signs-weather-satellite-launch-contract-with-indias-antrix/

 

 

 

 

Anyone have thoughts on this?  I know GPS RO is more accurate than other used  satellite based solutions, but I have my doubts that the new generation is more accurate than a weather balloon.

 

Also FYI there have been several other companies that have been planning to build similar sensors and launch them but haven't been able to get government funding. PlanetIQ finally had to contract with a private company from India.

thanks for posting this, great read

[Jim Marusak]

it is a good read. and just thinking off the top of my head, if they can calibrate the sensors using the balloons as a check on some of the initial data, I actually think this might actually work out ok. and as long as the results are even a bit better than the current extrapolations and other satellite data out there, the senor data might bring all the models up a few notches, especially over the oceans and over Africa as well as the more sparsely populated areas for central Asia. you can only be hopeful it works better than expected.

[dtk]

it is a good read. and just thinking off the top of my head, if they can calibrate the sensors using the balloons as a check on some of the initial data, I actually think this might actually work out ok. and as long as the results are even a bit better than the current extrapolations and other satellite data out there, the senor data might bring all the models up a few notches, especially over the oceans and over Africa as well as the more sparsely populated areas for central Asia. you can only be hopeful it works better than expected.

Observations are good, but this statement is misleading ... "The data is similar to that collected by weather balloons, but more accurate, more frequent and on a global scale."  For one, it is not directly measuring temperature and humidity like a RAOB.  That information has to be inferred from the actual measurement (signal delay, or the processed bending angle or refractivity).  Secondly, there is no wind information that can be directly extracted.

 

We already have a constellation of satellite that are using GPS, COSMIC: http://www.cosmic.ucar.edu/, with Cosmic-2 having launches coming soon.

 

In terms of impact, the current constellation of GPS Radio Occultation observations has been proven to be valuable for NWP.  For example, here is a summary plot showing the estimate time mean impact of various observing types in reducing the 24 hour forecast error using a global error energy metric from the NASA GEOS-5 System:

Note that "GPRSO" is up in the top half of the list, but below the hyperstectral sounders (AIRS, IASI), microwave sounders (AMSUA, ATMS), radiosondes, commercial aircraft based sensors (AMDAR/TAMDAR), and atmospheric motion vectors from the geostationary imagers.

 

Because these observations generally have very low bias, they have been extremely helpful in anchoring the bias corrections applied to the MW/IR radiance data.  The addition of this type of observation into the operational stream will indeed lead to potentially improved analysis and subsequent forecasts, but I suspect any improvement will be quite small/incremental.