“…RO observations improve weather prediction (Healy et al, 2005;Aparicio and Deblonde, 2008;Cardinali, 2009;Cucurull, 2010;Cardinali and Healy, 2014) and hurricane forecasts (e.g., Huang et al, 2005;Kuo et al, 2009;Liu et al 2012;Chen et al, 2015;. The RO data anchor atmospheric (re)analyses (Poli et al, 2010;Bauer et al, 2014;Simmons et al, 2017), and are useful for validating other types of observations (e.g., Steiner et al, 2007;He et al, 2009;Ladstädter et al, 2011;Ho et al, 2009a;2017;2018) and climate models (Ao et al, 2015;Pincus et al, 2017;Steiner et al, 2018).…”