Retrieval of 2-D tropospheric water vapour fields by using a constellation of co-rotating LEO satellites

Abstract

The normalised differential spectral attenuation (NDSA) approach has been recently introduced to retrieve integrated water vapour (IWV) content information from attenuation measurements over microwave links between two low earth orbit (LEO) satellites. In the original formulation, two counter-rotating satellites were considered in order to achieve vertical profiles of water vapour. In this paper, an extension of the method to the case of a constellation of co-rotating LEO satellites is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach to retrieve 2-D maps of the atmospheric water vapour content from IWV measurements.