On the issue of combined active-passive radio sounding of precipitation on radio-occultation paths

Abstract

The present study is a continuation of the earlier work on monitoring the atmospheric meteoparameters by the radio-occultation method. The possibility of identification of rains and detection of the rain-fall signature is investigated. It is shown that identification of rains and dry snowfalls with the use of activepassive (AP) sounding can be performed by direct measurements of attenuation by the Bouguer method and radiometric method. Radiophysical rainfall models for estimating attenuation and scattering of radio waves by rain are proposed. It is proposed to increase the informativity of the solution to the problem of precipitation identification through improvement of the new AP method for sounding precipitation on radio-occultation paths. It is shown that there exists a functional dependence between attenuation factor k (active sounding) and scattering factor α (passive sounding).