GNSS Radio Occultation Data in the AWS Cloud

Radio occultation (RO) by the Earth's atmosphere of the transmitted signals of the Global Navigation Satellite Systems' satellites has improved numerical weather prediction, has benefited atmospheric process studies, and benchmarked climate change by its strong traceability to the international definition of the second. Until now, research with RO has been isolated to the few centers that actually process the data and impracticable elsewhere because of limitations on data formats, organization and volume of the data, download bandwidth, and the lack of a database that can be queried before downloading data. We announce the availability of RO data in the Registry of Open Data of Amazon Web Services (AWS). RO data are freely available for download for the user and free to process and store for the manager of the repository. RO data as processed by the COSMIC Program Office at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, by the Radio Occultation Meteorology Satellite Application Facility (ROM SAF), by EUMETSAT, and by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory are available beginning with calibrated (excess) phase, extending to bending angle and refractivity and to retrievals of pressure, temperature and water vapor. The same RO repository also contains a metadata database that permits simple querying, filtering, and download of data using a Python application programming interface provided by this same project. Four tutorial demonstrations are provided as jupyter notebooks to provide representative samples of code to perform common research activities with RO data, including database querying and analysis, inter-center comparison of RO retrieval performance, and atmospheric process studies. Radio occultation is a space-based technique used to profile pressure, temperature, and water vapor in the Earth's atmosphere from the surface to the top of the stratosphere. It has unusual properties compared to other methods for measuring the atmosphere from space, particularly its powerful calibration and its astonishing vertical resolution, both made possible because it is based on a measurement of timing rather than radiance. This paper announces the availability of all Earth radio occultation (RO) data ever obtained (with a few small exceptions) from multiple data providers in the Registry of Open Data of Amazon Web Services. This repository of RO data is formulated to greatly ease access and manipulation of RO data to users anywhere in the world. It comes with tutorials on how the data can be accessed, downloaded, and analyzed in the form of jupyter notebooks. A repository of all historical Earth Radio occultation (RO) data of the atmosphere is now freely accessible in the Amazon Web Services Registry of Open Data Data are organized to enable common RO, atmospheric science, and climate science research by users anywhere RO sounding data are easily queried, subset, and downloaded through a Python package available by PyPI