The Fengyun-3 Radio Occultation Sounder Gnos: A Review Of The Missions And Early Results

The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) occultation sounder (GNOS) is one of the new generation payloads onboard the Chinese FengYun 3 (FY-3) series of operational meteorological satellites for sounding the Earth's neutral atmosphere and ionosphere. The FY-3C/-3D GNOS, onboard the FY-3 satellite C/D launched in September 2013 and November 2017, respectively, was designed for acquiring setting and rising radio occultation (RO) data by using GNSS signals from both the Chinese BeiDou System (BDS) and the U. S. Global Positioning System (GPS). So far, the GNOS measurements and atmospheric and ionospheric data products have been validated and evaluated and then been used for atmosphere and ionosphere related scientific applications.This paper reviews the FY-3 GNOS instrument, RO data processing, data quality evaluation, and research applications. The reviewed data validation and application results demonstrate that the FY-3 GNOS missions can provide accurate and precise atmospheric and ionospheric GNSS (i.e., GPS and BDS) RO profiles for numerical weather prediction (NWP), global climate monitoring (GCM) and space weather research (SWR). The performance of the FY-3 GNOS product quality evaluation and scientific applications establishes confidence that the GNOS data from the series of FY-3 satellites will provide important contributions to SWP, GCM and SWR scientific communities.