On September 12-18 JCSDA and COSMIC jointly hosted the 10th meeting of the International Radio Occultation Working Group (IROWG) at UCAR Center Green in Boulder, Colorado. JCSDA’s Hui Shao, co-chair of IROWG, Ben Ruston, the OBS lead, and COSMIC’s director, Jan Weiss, formed the local organizing committee with the support team from UCAR. The meeting was very well attended with about 160 scientists, engineers, students, and agency representatives from across the world. 181 abstracts were submitted, with high quality speakers and two poster sessions. The first day began with an introduction to IROWG followed by a very exciting guest speaker: Colorado Governor Jared Polis. “[you] are transforming weather prediction,” the governor said, adding how much he appreciated the spirit of collaboration in weather and climate science across agency and even country lines. “When we work together and innovate,” he declared, “we can truly reimagine what is possible.”
After that inspiring kick-off, the conference moved on to a history of COSMIC, COSMIC-2, and GPS-MET as we celebrated the respective 10-, 20-, and 30-year anniversaries of these trailblazing radio occultation (RO) satellites, with speakers from all three projects.
The next day launched into sessions on commercial RO, data processing and validation, and RO impacts on numerical weather prediction, including a talk by JCSDA’s Dr. Hailing Zhang on the intercomparison of GNSS RO quality control methods.
For the weekend the meeting broke into smaller subgroups focused on putting together recommendations for IROWG and for the Coordination Group for Meteorological Satellites (CGMS). Subgroup focuses ranged from RO technology and innovation to space weather.
Monday kicked off with a session on ROMEX (Radio Occultation Modeling EXperiment, examining the impact of RO data on numerical weather prediction) data assimilation chaired by JCSDA’s Dr. Ben Ruston, looking into methods and forecast impacts. This was followed by presentations on data impact studies and novel RO techniques. Tuesday highlighted space weather, atmospheric physics, and climate research. On the last day of IROWG-10 the subgroups presented their recommendations to the working group. These included encouraging the development of data assimilation systems (such as JEDI) to take full advantage of available RO data, encouraging the development and implementation of data assimilation methods like the JEDI airborne RO operator, continuing to work with commercial data, and launching a ROMEX-like project for space weather.