Publications

CHAMPCLIM is a joint project of the Institute for Geophysics, Astrophysics, and Meteorology (IGAM) at the University of Graz and the GeoForschungsZentrum (GFZ) in Potsdam. The overall aim of the CHAMPCLIM project is to help ensure that the CHAMP (CHAllenging Minisatellite Payload for geoscientific research) radio occultation (RO) data are exploited in the best possible manner for climate monitoring. For this purpose, the complete CHAMP RO data provided by GFZ on excess phase level (GFZ level 2, ~180 profiles/day) are currently processed at IGAM to obtain atmospheric profiles of refractivity, geopotential height, and temperature. These atmospheric profiles (~150 profiles/day) are used to create climatologies on a monthly, seasonal, and annual basis. After optimizing the RO data processing for climate applications and validation of the retrieval results using various reference data sources (on-going), the main emphasis is now on operational issues, processing of the 2002-2003 data, and on the creation of climatologies including error estimates. Our presentation will give an overview of the operational status of the CHAMPCLIM project which will include a brief discussion of technical aspects of the retrieval scheme as well as the binning strategy of creating our climatologies. In addition we will present first climatological error estimates. Seasonal climatologies will be presented as far as processed.

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Borsche, M.; Gobiet, A.; Steiner, A. K.; Foelsche, U.; Kirchengast, G.; Schmidt, T.; Wickert, J. (2004): Operationally Retrieving Radio Occultation Based Climatologies within the CHAMPCLIM Project. 2nd International Workshop on Occultations for Probing Atmosphere and Climate (OPAC-2) (Graz 2004).