Heidelberg 2022 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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EP: Fachverband Extraterrestrische Physik
EP 5: Near Earth Space
EP 5.1: Hauptvortrag
Dienstag, 22. März 2022, 16:15–16:45, EP-H1
Investigating Earth's atmosphere and ionosphere from space: How GNSS radio occultation measurements contribute to monitor the atmosphere in a high spatial resolution — •Christina Arras1, Ankur Kepkar1,2, and Jens Wickert1,2 — 1German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ, Potsdam, Germany — 2Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
The GNSS radio occultation (RO) technique has been established successfully during the previous two decades. It evolved into a valuable observation tool for precise atmospheric and ionospheric vertical profiling. Radio occultation measurements provide globally distributed precise profiles of the refractivity of the Earth's atmosphere that can be converted into profiles of temperature, pressure, and water vapor in the lower neutral atmosphere and into electron density values in the ionosphere. Until today, there are about 14 million RO recordings available.
GNSS RO signals are very sensitive to vertical electron density gradients in the Earth's ionosphere. This becomes visible as strong fluctuations in, e.g., signal-to-noise ratio recordings, which allow detecting ionospheric disturbances like sporadic E layers in the lower ionospheric E region and equatorial plasma bubbles in the F-layer.
In this presentation, we will give an overview on RO data availability. We will review the data analysis to derive information on ionospheric disturbances in the E and F layer. Further, we discuss the sporadic E and plasma bubble formations that result from complex coupling processes in the thermosphere-ionosphere-magnetosphere system.