Validation and data quality of CHAMP radio occultation data

Since the first successful radio occultation measurement taken by the GPS receiver onboard CHAMP, more than 40,000 vertical soundings of stratospheric temperature and tropospheric humidity have been processed at GFZ Potsdam. During the first year of the radio occultation experiment, several multi-week batches of quasi-continuous measurements have been collected, allowing for detailed validation against other meteorological measurements. This paper presents the first validation results and discusses some conclusions regarding the data quality of CHAMP radio occultation data drawn from these.