The CHAMP atmospheric processing system for radio occultation measurements

In this paper a description of the CHAMP atmospheric processing system for radio occultation data at GFZ Potsdam is given. The generation of radio occultation products, as e.g. atmospheric excess phases, vertical profiles of refractivity, temperature or water vapour is a complex process. Besidess the scientific challenge the design and installation of an automatic data processing system is also of great importance. This system must be able to process the different, input data from external data sources, coordinates the different, data streams and Scientific software modules, and feeds the results into the data centre automatically. Caused by different user demands the CHAMP Atmospheric Processor is divided into two parts: A rapid processing mode makes radio occultation analysis results available on average five hours after measurements. In the standard processing mode quality checked profiles of atmospheric parameters are available with a latency of about, two days.