Atmospheric Remote Sensing Data Processing Through Grid Computing Technique

The space-based GPS limb sounding, conventionally known as GPS Radio Occultation, is a remote sensing technique aiming at characterize the Earth atmosphere. The atmospheric profiling is done through the inversion of excess-phase measurements carried-out by a GPS receiver placed on-board a LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellite. 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 two aspects: how we managed the parallelization of the processing chain of Radio Occultation data and advantages to use this kind of architecture.