GNSS Radio Occultation Inversion Methods and Reflection Observations in the Lower Troposphere

Abstract: GNSS Radio Occultation (GNSS-RO) is an opportunistic Earth sensing technique where GNSS signals passing through the atmosphere are received in low Earth orbit and processed to extract meteorological parameters. As signals are received along an orbit, the measured Doppler shift is transformed to a bending angle profile (commonly referred to as bending angle retrieval), which, in turn, is inverted to a refractivity profile. Thanks to its high vertical resolution and SI traceability, GNSS-RO is an important complement to other Earth sensing endeavors. In the lower troposphere, GNSS-RO measurements often get degraded and biased due to sharp refractive gradients and other complex structures. The main objective of this thesis is to explore contemporary retrieval methods such as phase matching and full spectrum inversion to improve their performance in these conditions. To avoid the bias caused by the standard inversion, we attempt to derive additional information from the amplitude output of the examined retrieval operators. While simulations indicate that such information could be found, it is not immediately straightforward how to achieve this with real measurements. The approach chosen is to examine reflected signal components and their effect on the amplitude output.