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Radio Occultation via Satellites

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Handbook of Geomathematics

Abstract

Radio Occultation is a method which is able to measure atmospheric properties of the Earth as well as of distant planets via satellites. The basic idea of the method is to determine the Doppler shift of a signal emitted by a satellite which passes through the atmosphere of that planet. In this chapter, we want to give an introduction to Radio Occultation (RO) including the physical properties and its modeling aspects. Further on, in order to visualize the data obtained by RO and to give a comparison to other measurements like radiosondes as well as data obtained by other satellites, we introduce combined spherical interpolating and smoothing splines which are particularly suited to handle RO. In doing so, approximations become available to be consistent with the data and/or we are able to smooth out short-lived atmospheric weather phenomena. Exemplary, we use spherical splines to depict certain layers of the atmosphere on a global and local scale, to illustrate the change over time in a certain layer, to compute differences in order to compare 2 years at a certain layer, and to show atmospheric profiles at arbitrary locations on the Earth.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank their academic teacher, Prof. Dr. Willi Freeden, for permanent advice and many helpful suggestions. We would also like to thank Jens Wickert from the German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ) Potsdam, Germany, for providing us with the Radio Occultation dataset that was essential for the success of this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Geomathematics Group, University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Christian Blick & Sarah Eberle

Authors
  1. Christian Blick
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  2. Sarah Eberle
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christian Blick .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Geomathematics Group, University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Willi Freeden

  2. Department of Mathematics, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA

    M. Zuhair Nashed

  3. Computational Mathematics, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany

    Thomas Sonar

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Blick, C., Eberle, S. (2015). Radio Occultation via Satellites. In: Freeden, W., Nashed, M., Sonar, T. (eds) Handbook of Geomathematics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54551-1_100

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