Quality assessment of COSMIC/FORMOSAT-3 GPS radio occultation data derived from single- and double-difference atmospheric excess phase processing

A spectral analysis of 1 s GPS clock estimates indicates that a sampling interval of 1 s is necessary to adequately remove the GPS clock error with single-difference processing. One week (May 2 - 8, 2009) of COSMIC/FORMOSAT-3 data are analyzed in a post-processed mode with four different processing strategies: (1) double-differencing with 1 s GPS ground data, (2) single-differencing with 30 s GPS clock estimates (standard COSMIC Data Analysis and Archival Center product), (3) single-differencing with 5 s GPS clocks, and (4) single-differencing with 1 s GPS clocks.

Analyses of a common set of 5,596 RO profiles show that the neutral atmospheric bending angles and refractivities derived from single-difference processing with 1 s GPS clocks are the highest quality. The random noise of neutral atmospheric bending angles between 60 and 80 km heights is about 1.50e-6 rad for the single-difference cases and 1.74e-6 rad for double-differencing. An analysis of pairs of collocated soundings also shows that bending angles derived from single-differencing with 1 s GPS clocks are more consistent than with the other processing strategies.