Objectives of the Product

The primary market is a Commercial RO Service that provides RO data for Meteorology and NWP. This is the most mature RO market, which has recently reached the point where continuous financing can be foreseen to be available for procurement of commercial RO data products.

We base our mission on a trustable solution with strong heritage. Our heritage GRAS-2 instrument has been developed, within MetOp-SG, to meet EUMETSAT requirements for RO in the coming decades. The instrument flies on a satellite with proved reliability.

• A high-end space equipment to ensure high availability, dependability, and performance
• Long mission durations to maintain cost efficiency of data products

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Customers and their Needs

For European meteorology the accuracy increases by more occultations, the current need expressed by WMO is at least 20.000 occultations/day corresponding to 10 to 12 RO satellites with GRAS-2. ECMWF has demonstrated NWP improvements up to 100.000 occultations/day and EUMETSAT has expressed need for additional European commercial RO providers.

RO is extremely valuable for climate monitoring as it is a calibration free measurement without drifts. This means that RO observations also can be used to calibrate other data sources researched. RO observations for Meteorology can also serve climate.

RO for space weather, relate to monitoring and prediction of the ionosphere. In the long run we foresee that space weather will require more RO data than meteorology. The market is not mature yet but is under development.

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Target customers/users countries

The Commercial RO Service will be sold to the customer segments where we initially will focus on direct contract with EUMETSAT and NOAA for meteorological use as both EUMETSAT and NOAA currently have budget to procure commercial RO data.

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Product Description

The Commercial RO Service consists of a space segment and a ground segment. The main components of the Commercial RO Service are the GRAS-2 instrument hosted on a suitable satellite platform and the ground segment with processing and distribution of RO data products to paying customers.

The role of the Commercial RO Service in the context of the overall system/service of its target users is to provide access to global RO data of high quality with high availability and low latency. This RO data will improve the accuracy of numerical weather forecasts and will also contribute to improved climate monitoring, as well as space weather monitoring.

The external interfaces of the Commercial RO service are:

• The GRAS-2 instrument receives RF signals transmitted by GNSS satellites (Galileo, GPS, Beidou) on two frequency bands centred at 1575.42 MHz (L1) and 1176.45MHz (L5)

• The RO data user (customer) will receive Level 0 data through a User Interface Platform

• The RO data user (customer) will also receive data containing service quality indices through the User Interface Platform

Radio occultation conceptual geometry. The field-of-view of the different antennas are illustrated in green.

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Added Value

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Current Status

• Requirement Review performed including
  • Definition of Instrument Adaptations
  • Mission Requirements
• RFP issued to potential satellite service providers
  • Cover letter
  • SoW
  • Specification
• Instrument mission adaptations initiated
• Cloud Service Architecture initiated