Tomographic techniques for the retrieval of tropospheric water vapour fields by using co-rotating LEO satellites

• Published in: 2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) pp. 8124 - 8128
• Main Authors: Lapini, A., Cuccoli, F., Argenti, F., Facheris, L.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-05-2014
• Subjects: Atmospheric measurements; Atmospheric modeling; Attenuation; Attenuation measurement; co-rotating LEO satellites; Extraterrestrial measurements; inverse problems; Low earth orbit satellites; normalised differential spectral attenuation (NDSA); tomography; Tropospheric water vapour content estimation
• ISSN: 1520-6149; 2379-190X
• DOI: 10.1109/ICASSP.2014.6855184

This paper presents a study for the estimation of 2-D maps of atmospheric water vapour content from integrated water vapour measurements carried out by a constellation of co-rotating low earth orbit satellites. The proposed method uses the normalised differential spectral attenuation (NDSA) approach - able to achieve integrated water vapour content information from attenuation measurements over microwave links among the satellites - and tomographic techniques to solve the inverse problem of atmospheric water vapour field reconstruction. Simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach to retrieve a 2-D map of the atmospheric water vapour content. This study has been developed under the framework of the ANISAP project funded by the European Space Agency.