Prospects of the EPS GRAS Mission For Operational Atmospheric Applications

Abstract

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Receiver for Atmospheric Sounding (GRAS) is a radio occultation instrument especially designed and built for operational meteorological missions. GRAS has been developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) in the framework of the EUMETSAT Polar System (EPS). The GRAS instrument is already flying on board the first MetOp satellite (MetOp-A) that was launched in October 2006. It will also be on board two other MetOp satellites (MetOp-B and MetOp-C) that will successively cover the total EPS mission lifetime of over 14 yr. GRAS provides daily about 600 globally distributed occultation measurements and the GRAS data products are disseminated to the users in near?real time (NRT) so that they can be assimilated into numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems. All GRAS data and products are permanently archived and made available to the users for climate applications and scientific research through the EUMETSAT Unified Meteorological Archive and Retrieval Facility (U-MARF) and the GRAS Meteorology Satellite Application Facility (SAF) Archive and Retrieval Facility (GARF). The GRAS navigation data can be used in space weather applications.