• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
• /
• 2007.10a
• /
• pp.65-68
• /
• 2007

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.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
• /
• 2005.10a
• /
• pp.87-90
• /
• 2005

The FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC mission is a micro satellite mission to deploy a constellation of six micro satellites at low Earth orbits. The final mission orbit is of an altitude of 750-800 lan. It is a collaborative Taiwan-USA science experiment. Each satellite consists of three science payloads in which the GPS occultation experiment (GOX) payload will collect the GPS signals for the studies of meteorology, climate, space weather, and geodesy. The GOX onboard FORMOSAT -3 is designed as a GPS receiver with 4 antennas. The fore and aft limb antennas are installed on the front and back sides, respectively, and as well as the two precise orbit determination (POD) antennas. The precise orbit information is needed for both the occultation inversion and geodetic research. However, the instrument associated errors, such as the antenna phase center offset and even the different cable delay due to the geometric configuration of fore- and aft-positions of the POD antennas produce error on the orbit. Thus, the focus of this study is to investigate the impact of POD antenna parameter on the determination of precise satellite orbit. Furthermore, the effect of the accuracy of the determined satellite orbit on the retrieved atmospheric and ionospheric parameters is also examined. The CHAMP data, the FORMOSAT-3 satellite and orbit parameters, the Bernese 5.0 software, and the occultation data processing system are used in this work. The results show that 8 cm error on the POD antenna phase center can result in ~8 cm bias on the determined orbit and subsequently cause 0.2 K deviation on the retrieved atmospheric temperature at altitudes above 10 lan.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
• /
• v.1
• /
• pp.312-315
• /
• 2006

Radio occultation technique has been used in planetary science to obtain reliable and accurate temperature profiles of the other planets' atmosphere for decades. It relies on the fact that radio waves are bent and delayed due to the gradient of atmospheric refractivity along-ray-path. With the advent of Global Positioning System (GPS), it becomes possible to retrieve the refractivity and temperature profiles of the Earth's atmosphere from the occultation data. We have developed a retrieval algorithm and compared the results of our algorithm with the data of CHAMP to verify the accuracy of our algorithm is good enough. In our algorithm, there are some smoothing steps when retrieving. We analysis the data of FORMOSAT-3 and compare the results with and without smoothing and the results of TACC to see is there any phenomenon deleted after smoothing.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
• /
• 2008.10a
• /
• pp.192-195
• /
• 2008

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.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
• /
• 2005.10a
• /
• pp.142-145
• /
• 2005

Since the successful launch of FORMOSAT -2 satellite by National Space Organization of Taiwan in May 2004, the Remote Sensing Instrument (RSI) on- board the FORMOSAT -2 has continuously acquired images at one panchromatic and four multi-spectral bands (http://www.nspo.org.tw). In general, the RSI performs well and receives high quality images which proved to be very useful for various applications. However, some RSI panchromatic products exhibit obvious trembling artifact that must be removed. Preliminary study reveals that the trembling artifact is caused by the instability of the spacecraft attitude. Though the magnitude of this artifact is actually less than half of a pixel, it affects the applicability of panchromatic products. A procedure removing this artifact is therefore needed for providing image products of consistent quality. Due to the nature of trembling artifact, it is impossible to describe the trembling amount by employing an analytic model. Relied only on image itself, an algorithm determining trembling amount and removing accordingly the trembling artifact is proposed. The algorithm consists of 3 stages. First, a cross-correlation based scheme is used to measure the relative shift between adjacent scan lines. Follows, the trembling amount is estimated from the measured value. For this purpose, the Fourier transform is utilized to characterize random shifts in frequency domain. An adaptive estimation method is then applied to deduce the approximate trembling amount. In the subsequent stage, image re-sampling operation is applied to restore the trembling-free product. Experimental results show that by applying the proposed algorithm, the unpleasant trembling artifact is no longer evident.

• Journal of Satellite, Information and Communications
• /
• v.8 no.1
• /
• pp.14-22
• /
• 2013

GPS radio occultation is a remote sensing technique probing atmospheric properties based on the fact that GPS signal is refracted and delayed by atmosphere. The FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC mission jointly developed by the USA and Taiwan is providing about 2500 occultation soundings a day on the near real-time basis. The Korean KOMPSAT-5/AOPOD system is preparing to launch for monitoring troposphere and ionosphere using a dual frequency GPS receiver and the antenna for occultation data acquisition. In this paper, we examine the methods for signal processing and the geometry analysis for GPS radio occultation, and look into the retrieval techniques for the temperature and humidity of troposphere and the electron density and scintillation of ionosphere. Using these atmospheric properties, we aim to derive the strategies for applying GPS radio occultation to space weather, for example, ionospheric TEC(total electron content) analysis for earthquake monitoring and the Open API(application programming interface) development for more effective data service.

• International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology
• /
• v.7 no.1
• /
• pp.57-78
• /
• 2017

There are several statistical classification algorithms available for land use/land cover classification. However, each has a certain bias or compromise. Some methods like the parallel piped approach in supervised classification, cannot classify continuous regions within a feature. On the other hand, while unsupervised classification method takes maximum advantage of spectral variability in an image, the maximally separable clusters in spectral space may not do much for our perception of important classes in a given study area. In this research, the output of an ANN algorithm was compared with the Possibilistic c-Means an improvement of the fuzzy c-Means on both moderate resolutions Landsat8 and a high resolution Formosat 2 images. The Formosat 2 image comes with an 8m spectral resolution on the multispectral data. This multispectral image data was resampled to 10m in order to maintain a uniform ratio of 1:3 against Landsat 8 image. Six classes were chosen for analysis including: Dense forest, eucalyptus, water, grassland, wheat and riverine sand. Using a standard false color composite (FCC), the six features reflected differently in the infrared region with wheat producing the brightest pixel values. Signature collection per class was therefore easily obtained for all classifications. The output of both ANN and FCM, were analyzed separately for accuracy and an error matrix generated to assess the quality and accuracy of the classification algorithms. When you compare the results of the two methods on a per-class-basis, ANN had a crisper output compared to PCM which yielded clusters with pixels especially on the moderate resolution Landsat 8 imagery.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
• /
• 2007.10a
• /
• pp.394-396
• /
• 2007

Radio occultation (RO) technique has been used in planetary science since 1960s. When signal goes through atmosphere, it is refracted due to the gradient of atmospheric refractivity. In 1995, the first low earth orbit (LEO) satellite, MicroLab-1, was launched to conduct RO mission. It receives the signal from global positioning system (GPS) satellites. After MicroLab-1, other RO missions, such as CHAMP, SAC-C, and GRACE, are executed in several years later. In 2006, Taiwan launched six LEO satellites for RO mission. The mission name is Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate (COSMIC). Under some abnormal situations, multipath and strong fluctuation in phase and amplitude of the signal appear in moist troposphere. Therefore, open loop (OL) technique has been applied to replace traditional phase lock loop (PLL) technique. In this paper, we will summarize the retrieval processing procedure and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of OL technique.