Feiqin Xie

An approach for retrieving marine boundary layer refractivity from GPS occultation data in the presence of superrefraction

Abstract The global positioning system (GPS) radio occultation (RO) technique has demonstrated the ability to precisely probe earth’s atmosphere globally with high vertical resolution. However, the lowermost troposphere still presents some challenges for the technique. Over moist marine areas, especially in subtropical regions, a very large negative moisture gradient often exists across the thermal inversion capping the marine boundary layer (MBL), which frequently causes superrefraction (SR), or ducting. In the presence of SR, the reconstruction of refractivity from RO data becomes an ill-posed inverse problem. This study shows that one given RO bending angle profile is consistent with a continuum (an infinite number) of refractivity profiles. The standard Abel retrieval gives the minimum refractivity solution of the continuum and thus produces the largest negative bias, consistent with a negative bias often present in the retrieved refractivity profiles in the moist lower troposphere. By applying a simp...

Profiling the Atmosphere Using the Airborne GPS Radio Occultation Technique: A Sensitivity Study

Global Positioning System (GPS) radio occultation (RO) sounding, with its high vertical resolution temperature and humidity profiling capability, is revolutionizing atmospheric science, particularly through assimilation in numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. Currently, the observations are derived from GPS receivers onboard low Earth orbiting satellites. However, with the current number of satellites, it is difficult to provide dense sounding measurements in a specific region within a limited time period. With a GPS receiver onboard an airplane, the GPS RO technique offers such an opportunity while retaining the high vertical resolution sounding capability. The GNSS Instrument System for Multistatic and Occultation Sensing is currently under development for the National Science Foundations High-performance Instrumented Airborne Platform for Environmental Research (HIAPER) aircraft. This paper presents a sensitivity analysis of the airborne occultation technique that will be used for the HIAPER system. The results demonstrate an anticipated overall accuracy of better than 0.5% for the retrieved refractivity from the surface to about 1 km below the airplane, where the expected airplane velocity errors of up to 5 mm/s limit the accuracy. The effects on the retrievals due to horizontal variations in atmospheric refractivity are significant, and retrieval errors may reach several percent inside frontal systems when the front is perpendicular to the ray paths and within 200 km of the tangent point. In general, the airborne GPS RO system provides a promising new data source for NWP and targeted observational studies.

Development and testing of the GISMOS instrument

The GNSS Instrument System for Multistatic and Occultation Sensing (GISMOS) is a new remote sensing system in development for the HIAPER Gulfstream V (GV) aircraft. This system is designed to use occulted and reflected Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals to retrieve tropospheric water vapor, ocean surface roughness and soil moisture during long duration, high altitude, flights. This paper summarizes the design and ground testing of GISMOS as well as the current flight test schedule.

The Impact of Airborne Radio Occultation Observations on the Simulation of Hurricane Karl (2010)

AbstractThis study evaluates, for the first time, the impact of airborne global positioning system radio occultation (ARO) observations on a hurricane forecast. A case study was conducted of Hurricane Karl during the Pre-Depression Investigation of Cloud-Systems in the Tropics (PREDICT) field campaign in 2010. The assimilation of ARO data was developed for the three-dimensional variational (3DVAR) analysis system of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model version 3.2. The impact of ARO data on Karl forecasts was evaluated through data assimilation (DA) experiments of local refractivity and nonlocal excess phase (EPH), in which the latter accounts for the integrated horizontal sampling along the signal ray path. The tangent point positions (closest point of an RO ray path to Earth’s surface) drift horizontally, and the drifting distance of ARO data is about 2 to 3 times that of spaceborne RO, which was taken into account in these simulations.Results indicate that in the absence of other satellite ...