Data Quality Determination of Radio Occultation in moist troposphere

  • Published : 2007.10.31

Abstract

How to observe the atmosphere is a subject of atmospheric research. The meteorological satellites and the ground states are used to do observation. However, both ways do not satisfy the requirement of scientists, especially the profiles of atmosphere on the ocean and the data for global atmosphere. Radio occultation (RO) technique, which has been used in planet science, is a method to solve the problem. In RO technique, the low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite receives the two frequency signal of Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite. The excess phase of the signal is calculated to retrieve the profiles of atmosphere parameters. In moist troposphere, the fluctuations appear in the phase of the signal and open loop (OL) is used to resolve it. The quality of the GPS signal generally deteriorates as the altitude decreases. In the procedure, the SNR of the GPS signal is used as the criterion. However, the SNR decreases with fluctuation which makes it difficult to locate the data of poor quality. In this paper, the phase of the signal will be used as part of the criterion.

Keywords