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Published February 23, 1996 | public
Journal Article

Initial Results of Radio Occultation Observations of Earth's Atmosphere Using the Global Positioning System

Abstract

Recent radio occultation measurements using Global Positioning System satellite transmitters and an orbiting receiver have provided a globally distributed set of high-resolution atmospheric profiles, suggesting that the technique may make a significant contribution to global change and weather prediction programs. Biases in occultation temperatures relative to radiosonde and model data are about 1 kelvin or less in the tropics and are generally less than 0.5 kelvin at higher latitudes. Data quality is sufficient to quantify significant model errors in remote regions. Temperature profiles also reveal either an equatorial Rossby-gravity or an inertio-gravity wave. Such waves provide a fundamental source of momentum for the stratospheric circulation.

Additional Information

© 1996 American Association for the Advancement of Science. 11 September 1995; Accepted 28 December 1995. The research described here was largely performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, supported jointly by NASA and the California Institute of Technology through the Caltech President's fund. We are grateful to out collaborators, GPS-MET principal investigator R. Ware and project manager M. Exner, of the UCAR, Boulder, CO, for providing us with access to raw flight data from the GPS-MET experiment. We also thank the ECMWF for providing us with atmospheric data, software, and assistance with data interpretation and M. E. Gelman of the National Meteorological Center (NMC) for many useful discussions on the NMC radiosonde data set.

Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
October 19, 2023