The Application of COSMIC Data to Global Change Research

The constellation observing system for meteorology, ionosphere, and climate (COSMIC) is well-suited to climate research, especially as it pertains to climate modeling. It presents a challenge to climate models, which are currently tuned to match climate mean states, by providing precisely calibrated data which can be analyzed according to two methods that are insensitive to standard model tuning. Those two methods that are insensitive to standard model tuning. Those two methods are climate signal detection and second-moment statistics, both of which consider the most useful climate model to be the one which provides the best predictions rather than the one which best recreates the current climate. In this paper we discuss these two new, alternative approaches to improving climate models and how COSMIC occultation data can be analyzed in this context.