NCURO DATA RETRIEVAL ALGORITHM IN FORMOSAT-3 GPS RADIO OCCULTATION OBSERVATION OF GRAVITY WAVE ACTIVITY

Radio occultation (RO) has been used in the planetary science since Microlab-1 was launched in 1995. With the RO technique, the profiles of atmosphere and the global atmospheric data can be obtained. In 2006, Taiwan launched six low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites as the RO constellation mission, known as FORMOSAT-3. In order to retrieve the RO data from original data, a retrieval algorithm, NCURO, is developed. The input of NCURO algorithm is mainly the excess phase of GPS signal, and the output is the dry pressure and dry temperature. Using temperature profiles retrieved by NCURO algorithm, temperature perturbation and potential energy of gravity wave have been evaluated. In this paper, the retrieval algorithm and the global distribution of energy of gravity waves are described and demonstrated.