Assimilating Spire and COSMIC-2 data into the IFS
Lonitz, Katrin ; Bowler, Neill ; Holm, Elias ; Healy, Sean
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, ECMWF was offered free access to commercial Global Navigation Satellite System Radio Occultation (GNSS-RO) data from Spire Global (Spire in the following). This offer was to partially mitigate the loss of aircraft observations. Without having a chance to test the impact of Spire data in detail, the data was assimilated operationally from 13 May to 30 September 2020, about five weeks after the initial Spire offer. Even before COVID-19 hit the globe, plans were already in the making to perform a detailed investigation of the impact of the assimilation of Spire data into ECMWF's Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) and the UK Met Office system. On 1 July 2020, a project funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) and conducted at ECMWF, the UK Met Office and EUMETSAT started to study exactly this.<br></p>
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