Radio Occultation Measurements of the Lower Troposphere: A Simulation Study

We use simulations to investigate the ability of the Radio Occultation technique to capture the vertical refractivity structure within the Atmospheric Boundary Layer. We first generate a suite of atmospheric profiles of pressure, temperature, water content, and boundary layer height, calculate a suite of forward models to get phase variations which are then run through standard Abel transform-based inversion methods to retrieve the input parameters. We are interested to see if the structure between the bottom and top of the ABL can be resolved in spite of the well known negative bias caused by the large refractivity gradients at the top of the ABL. This study can be used as a basis for comparison with other experimental radio occultation inversion methods.