Source - GNSS Radio Occultation Technique

Scope of this note

This is a starter source scaffold for GNSS Radio Occultation as an ionospheric observational technique.

Boundary:

  • It is not a completed literature review.
  • It does not verify the accuracy, calibration, or operational readiness of any specific RO constellation.
  • It exists to anchor technique claims in the vault to identifiable datasets and literature.

Why this source note matters

The vault contains empirical ionospheric analysis derived from GNSS-RO data. Without a technique-level source scaffold, it is unclear which data products, constellations, and processing pipelines support the claims.

Current in-vault references supported by this scaffold

Current provisional usage in the vault

At present, this scaffold supports only the statement that:

  • GNSS Radio Occultation provides an independent empirical measurement of ionospheric TEC from low-Earth-orbiting satellites
  • Spire/COSMIC-2 podTec data from UCAR CDAAC was used for the Indonesian empirical study
  • RO-based TEC is a threat-discovery proxy, not a certified SBAS correction source

It does not yet support:

  • Any claim that RO TEC is interchangeable with ground GNSS IPP TEC
  • Any quantified accuracy specification for Spire podTec vs other datasets
  • Any operational readiness assessment for RO-based SBAS service

Immediate audit questions

  • Which Spire data product version was used (Level 1, 2, or higher)?
  • What is the published calibration accuracy of podTec versus ground-truth TEC?
  • How do UCAR CDAAC quality-control flags affect the usable profile count?
  • What is the spatial footprint of a single RO tangent point relative to SBAS grid cell size?

Suggested downstream cleanup targets

If this scaffold becomes source-backed, revisit and tighten claims in:

Extraction template for next cycle

  • Verified dataset/product name and version
  • Constellation and instrument specifications
  • Data provider and access path
  • Published accuracy/bias specifications
  • Quality-control flag definitions
  • Relationship between RO TEC geometry and SBAS IPP geometry

See also