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Phase acceleration: a new important parameter in GPS occultation technology

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Abstract

Based on 40 years of radio-occultation (RO) experiments, it is now recognized that the phase acceleration of radio waves (equal to the time derivative of the Doppler shift), derived from analysis of high-stability Global Positioning System (GPS) RO signals, is as important as the Doppler frequency. The phase acceleration technique allows one to convert the phase and Doppler frequency changes into refractive attenuation variations. From such derived refractive attenuation and amplitude data, one can estimate the integral absorption of radio waves. This is important for future RO missions when measuring water vapor and minor atmospheric gas constituents, because the difficulty of removing the refractive attenuation effect from the amplitude data can be avoided. The phase acceleration technique can be applied also for determining the location and inclination of sharp layered plasma structures (including sporadic E s layers) in the ionosphere. The advantages of the phase acceleration technique are validated by analyzing RO data from the Challenging Minisatellite Payload (CHAMP) and the FORMOSA Satellite Constellation Observing Systems for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate missions (FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC).

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to NSPO (Taiwan) and UCAR (USA) for making FORMOSAT3 experimental RO data available. This work was jointly supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project no. 06-02-17071, the National Science Council of Taiwan, grant no. NSC 96-2811-M-008-061, and the NSPO (Taiwan), grant no. 97-NSPO(B)-SP-FA07-03(F).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics of Russian Academy of Sciences (IRE RAS), Fryazino, Vvedenskogo sq. 1, 141190, Moscow, Russia

    A. G. Pavelyev & A. A. Pavelyev

  2. Center for Space and Remote Sensing Research, National Central University, Chung-Li, 320, Taiwan

    Y. A. Liou

  3. GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam (GFZ-Potsdam), Telegrafenberg, 14473, Potsdam, Germany

    J. Wickert & T. Schmidt

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  1. A. G. Pavelyev
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  2. Y. A. Liou
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  3. J. Wickert
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  4. T. Schmidt
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  5. A. A. Pavelyev
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Correspondence to Y. A. Liou.

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Pavelyev, A.G., Liou, Y.A., Wickert, J. et al. Phase acceleration: a new important parameter in GPS occultation technology. GPS Solut 14, 3–11 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-009-0128-1

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