The Constellation Observing System for Meteorology Ionosphere and climate follow-on mission

COSMIC/FORMOSAT-3 is a joint U.S.-Taiwan 6-microsatellite demonstration mission that was launched in April 2006. It is the world´s first operational GPS radio occultation (RO) mission for global Earth weather forecasting; climate monitoring; and atmospheric, ionospheric, and geodetic research. The GPS-RO data has been demonstrated to be valuable to the climate, meteorology, and space weather communities. COSMIC has proven to increase the accuracy of the predictions of hurricane/typhoon behavior, significantly improve long-range weather forecasts, and monitor climate change with unprecedented accuracy. COSMIC will reach the end of its design life in 2011, and the critical capability it provides has already begun to degrade as satellites reach their end of life. As a result, NOAA and NSPO intend to jointly develop and launch COSMIC-2, a high-reliability next generation follow-on system. COSMIC-2 will provide the next generation of global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-RO data to users who critically depend on it.