Results from the NASA Tropics Mission After One Year in Orbit

The four NASA TROPICS Earth Venture (EVI-3) CubeSat constellation satellites were successfully launched into orbit on May 8 and May 26, 2023 (NZST) – two satellites were deployed in each launch. TROPICS is now providing nearly all-weather observations of 3-D temperature and humidity, as well as cloud ice and precipitation horizontal structure, at a median refresh rate of approximately 60 minutes to conduct high-value science investigations of tropical cyclones. TROPICS provides microwave measurements in twelve channels spanning 90-205 GHz over the tropics that can be used to observe the thermodynamics of the troposphere and precipitation structure for storm systems at the mesoscale and synoptic scale over the entire storm lifecycle. Hundreds of high-resolution images of tropical cyclones have been captured thus far by the TROPICS mission, revealing detailed structure of the eyewall and surrounding rain bands. The new 205-GHz channel in particular (together with a traditional channel near 91.65 GHz) is providing new information on the inner storm structure, and, coupled with the relatively frequent revisit and low downlink latency, is informing tropical cyclone analysis at operational centers. In this paper, the radiance and geophysical performance of Pathfinder and the constellation satellites is presented, showing that the mission is on track to meet its baseline requirements.