Weather-Induced Satellite Orbit Perturbations

Satellites in Earth's orbit are exposed to Earth radiation, consisting of reflected solar and emitted thermal radiation, thereby exerting a non-conservative force that causes acceleration and affects the orbits. Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission aiming to retrieve the Earth's gravity potential is critically dependent on accounting for this force and all other non-gravitational forces. There are both diurnal and seasonal variations in the Earth's radiation pressure, of which the seasonal variability can be represented by climatology. Nevertheless, the daily variations in the Earth's radiation pressure, due to the transient changes in the weather; for example, clouds and their properties, are not accounted for in the orbit perturbations studies. We show here that the top-of-atmosphere radiation fluxes computed with a numerical weather prediction (NWP) model explain most of the measured short-term variations in the radial acceleration of the GRACE-FO satellite. Our physics-based modeling corrects a hitherto unexplained lack of power spectral density in the measured accelerations. For example, we can accurately model the accelerations associated with a tropical storm in the Indian Ocean in December 2020, which would not be possible when using climatological data. Our results demonstrate that using a global numerical weather prediction model significantly improves the simulation of non-gravitational effects in the satellites' orbits. In the 7-day data set, OpenIFS-simulated acceleration exhibited higher accuracy than climatological-data-simulated acceleration (2.5 compared to 2.6 nms⁻²) and an improved precision (2.6 compared to 3.0 nms⁻²). This advancement contributes to a more precise orbit determination across various applications in Earth sciences.