Preliminary results for Atmospheric Remote Sensing data processing through Grid computing

In September 2009, the Indian Remote Sensing OCEANSAT-2 satellite was launched from Sriharikota(India). Moreover, OCEANSAT-2 carries on-board a third payload, called ROSA (Radio Occultation Sounder of the Atmospheric) and developed by the Italian Space Agency, which give very accurate information about the vertical structure of the atmosphere, through the exploitation of the GPS Radio Occultation technique. This is a remote sensing technique aiming to characterize the Earth atmosphere. The GPS signal observed when it emerges from the Earth limb, is refracted by the Earth atmosphere; through inversion techniques, it is possible to retrieve atmospheric refractivity profiles, which in turn may be used to obtain temperature, pressure and humidity profiles. Considering that there is a great deal of data to process, this paper presents an architecture solution based on Grid Computing. We want to focus the attention on how we managed the parallelization of the processing chain of Radio Occultation data in order to evaluate the gain in performances and time obtained using the distributed architecture and for a collaborative engineering approach.