Radio occultation (RO) is a powerful tool for remotely sensing the atmosphere, producing globally distributed soundings with high vertical resolution and high temperature retrieval accuracy, especially in the stratosphere. The spatial distribution of the soundings typically prevents the use of these measurements for studying atmospheric effects with small horizontal or temporal scales. However, careful arrangement of a dedicated RO constellation can yield sounding clusters useful for the tomographic reconstruction of internal gravity waves with horizontal wavelengths in the tens of kilometers. This paper presents occultation cluster quality metrics predictive of internal gravity wave tomographic reconstruction error and uses these metrics to compare the performance of two alternative RO constellation geometries, mutual orbit groups (MOG) and a spread in right ascension of the ascending node (RAAN). MOG constellations have better overall performance and yield more consistent cluster quality across all sampled latitudes, while RAAN-spread constellations have improved equatorial quality and a trend toward reduced quality at the edges of the latitude range. Additionally, analysis of clusters by latitude, ray azimuth, and quality is performed in order to examine the trends in the outlier best-and worst-performing clusters for each constellation type.

Abstract. Radio occultation (RO) using the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) can be used to infer atmospheric profiles of microwave refractivity in the Earth's atmosphere. GNSS RO data are now assimilated into numerical weather prediction models and used for climate monitoring. New remote sensing applications are being considered that fuse GNSS RO soundings and passive nadir-scanned radiance soundings. Collocating RO soundings and nadir-scanned radiance soundings, however, is computationally expensive, especially as new commercial GNSS RO constellations greatly increase the number of global daily RO soundings. This paper develops a new and efficient technique, called the “rotation–collocation method”, for collocating RO and nadir-scanned radiance soundings in which all soundings are rotated into the time-dependent reference frame in which the nadir sounder's scan pattern is stationary. Collocations with RO soundings are then found when the track of an RO sounding crosses the line corresponding to the nadir sounder's scan pattern. When applied to finding collocations between RO soundings from COSMIC-2, Metop-B-GRAS, and Metop-C-GRAS and the passive microwave (MW) soundings of the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) on NOAA-20 and Suomi-NPP and the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU-A) on Metop-B and Metop-C for the month of January 2021, the rotation–collocation method proves to be 99.0 % accurate and is hundreds to thousands of times faster than traditional approaches to finding collocations.

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