Gravity wave activities in the polar region using FORMOSAT-3 GPS RO observations

FORMOSAT-3 was launched in April of 2006. It consists of six low earth orbit (LEO) satellites that will be eventually deployed to an orbit at 800 km height. Its scientific goal is to utilize the radio occultation (RO) signals to measure the bending angles when the GPS signals transect the atmosphere. The bending angle is then used to infer atmospheric parameters, including refractivity, temperature, pressure, and relative humidity fields of global distributions through inversion schemes and auxiliary information. The expected number of RO events is around 2500 per day, of which 200 events or so fall into the polar region. Consequently, the FORMOSAT-3 observations are expected to play a key role to improve our knowledge in the weather forecasting and space physics research in the polar region. In this paper, we use temperature profiles retrieved from FORMOSAT-3 RO observations to study the climatology of gravity wave activity in the polar region. FORMOSAT-3 can provide about 200 RO observations a day in the polar region, much more than previous GPS RO missions, and, hence, more detailed climatology of gravity wave activity can be obtained.