Retreiving Stratopause Height From COSMIC Radio Occultations

An approach is described to use COSMIC radio occultation (RO) data to identify heights of the cold point tropopause (CPT) and the stratopause. Current temperature profile retrievals only reach up to ~40 km and RO refractivity is only retrieved up to ~60 km. A GCM-independent initialization of the hydrostatic integral is used to obtain temperature profiles that extend higher up, above the stratopause. We also describe a method to detect scale height changes from bending angle profiles and identify the tropopause and stratopause. These are compared with the heights where changes occur in the temperature lapse rate. After discussing the limitations, challenges, and capabilities of the approach used, the method is applied to radio occultation profiles from 2011 to study variations with space/time/season in stratosphere thickness.