Sampled Together: Assessing the Value of Simultaneous Co-located Measurements for Optimal Satellite Configurations

Abstract This work applies a quantitative metric in order to capture the relative representativeness of non-simultaneous or non-co-located observations and quantify how these observations decorrelate in both space and time. This methodology allows for the effective determination of thresholding decisions for representative matchup conditions, and is especially useful for informing future network designs and architectures. Future weather and climate satellite missions must consider a range of architectural trades to meet observing requirements. Frequently, fundamental decisions such as the number of observatories, the instruments manifested, and orbit parameters are determined based upon assumptions about the characteristic temporal and spatial scales of variability of the target observation. With the introduced methodology, representativity errors due to separations in space and time can be quantified without prior knowledge of instrument performance, and errors driven by constellation design can be estimated without model ingest or analysis.