Using Radio Occultation Data for Ionospheric Studies

Abstract

The long-term goal of this research is to develop Global Positioning System (GPS) radio occultation (RO) techniques that improve our understanding of the Earth's ionosphere and its' variability. In the future, RO data promise to become a significant ionospheric data source and will assist in the development of better physics based models, help specify global ionospheric electron density and scintillation fields, provide improved climatology, and also help calibrate other ionospheric sensors and algorithms. Our first objective was to modify the radio holographic back propagation (BP) method, which had been previously used, for the localization of electron density irregularities along the line of sight, by taking into account the structure of the irregularities. The modified method has been tested and validated by processing the GPS/MET RO data. The second objective was to include the ionospheric retrieval algorithms for RO data in the COSMIC Data Analysis and Archive Center (CDAAC) software. CDAAC shall analyze data from current and future occultation missions and provide those data and results to the science community.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 30, 2001
Accession Number
ADA623791

Entities

People

  • Christian Rocken
  • Sergey V. Sokolovskiy
  • William Schreiner

Organizations

  • University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Altitude
  • Amplitude Modulation
  • Artificial Satellites
  • Electron Density
  • Electrons
  • Global Positioning Systems
  • Ionosondes
  • Ionosphere
  • Line Of Sight
  • Magnetic Fields
  • Modulation
  • Occultation
  • Radio Communications
  • Simulations
  • Two Dimensional

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Space/Atmospheric Physics.

Technology Areas

  • Microelectronics
  • Space