COSMIC GPS ionospheric sensing and space weather

Accurate space weather specification and forecasting require proper modeling which account for the coupling between the sun, the magnetosphere, the thermosphere, the ionosphere and the mesosphere. In spite of the tremendous advances that have been made in understanding the physics behind different space weather phenomena, the ability to specify or predict space weather is limited due to the lack of continuous and extensive observations in these regions.

Placing a constellation of GPS receivers in low-Earth orbit, such as the Constellation Observing System for Meterology, Ionosphere, and Climate (COSMIC), provides an extremely powerful system for continuously and extensively measuring one of these regions, the ionosphere. COSMIC, by use of GPS occultations, will make it possible to obtain continuous and global 3-dimensional images of electron density, irregularities and TIDs in the ionosphere and plasmasphere.