ROSA - The Italian Radio Occultation Mission Onboard the Indian OCEANSAT-2 Satellite

At the beginning of 2008 the Indian satellite OCEANSAT-2 will be launched. This satellite will carry on-board two payloads for ocean studies and the Italian Radio Occultation GPS receiver (ROSA) devoted to atmospheric studies. In the framework of thismission, the ROSA instrument will only be able to observe rising occultations collecting data both in Open-Loop and in Close-Loop modes. These data will be downloaded both to the Indian and the Italian receiving stations where they will be processed by the ROSA ground segment, completely developed by Italian universities and research centres. In particular, this ground segment will be implemented at a first level in an integrated computing infrastructure installed in Matera and mirrored at Hyderbad in India and, at a second level, on a distributed software and hardware infrastructure. This second infrastructure will perform the rapid and precise Orbit Determination and Prediction, the unambiguous bending and impact parameters profiles extraction, the ionospheric correction and the stratospheric initialization, the refractivity, pressure, temperature and humidity profile retrieval, the value added services for meteorology, climate and space weather applications. This will identify a prototype of distributed and Multimission Ground Processing Centre distributed through the various research centres and universities involved, connected through a Web-based GRID computing infrastructure. After a description of these two different implementations of the ROSA Ground Segment, this contribution will focus on the scientific activities carried on by the Italian institution involved in the project: - Physics Dept. of Universita' di ROMA: development of climatological indexes. These activity is based on the utilization of RO data for climatic study. The main work will be focused on tropopause temperature and height determination, large scale water vapour analysis, geopotential field retrieving for dynamic indexes, evaluation and comparisonof RO data with LIDAR profiles in stratosphere. ... ... ...