Extreme weather monitoring using GPS radio occultation technique: Preliminary result from 2010 Yunnan drought analysis

Abstract

Extreme weather events due to the climate changing (e.g., snow storms in UK and USA, flooding in Indonesia and drought and torrential rain in China occurred almost concurrently) have disastrous impacts on environment, society and economy worldwide. However, monitoring and prediction of these extreme weather events have been challenging tasks due to limited atmospheric information from conventional meteorological observation systems. Due to unprecedented high vertical resolution, high accuracy, global coverage and long-term stability, the Global Positioning System (GPS) radio occultation (RO) technique has a great potential to complement other meteorological observation systems and improve extreme weather monitoring and forecasting. This research investigates a method of extreme weather monitoring using GPS RO technique. The profiles from COSMIC GPS RO mission are used to analyze the drought in the southwest of China in 2010. The results demonstrate the great potential of GPS RO technique to extreme weather events monitoring. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH.