Tomographic Reconstruction of Water Vapor Density Fields From the Integration of GNSS Observations and Fengyun-4A Products

Abstract

The potential of precipitable water vapor (PWV) maps retrieved by remote sensing satellites can address the geometry defect of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) observations in tropospheric tomography. The second-generation geostationary meteorological satellite Fengyun-4A (FY-4A) of China can provide PWV products with high spatial (4 km) and temporal (15 min) resolutions. This article presents the first study on water vapor tomography by integrating GNSS measurements and FY-4A products using the node-based parameterized method. Layer PWV (LPW) products of FY-4A instead of the total PWV are adopted, which can increase the rank of the tomographic equation significantly. The integrated tomography model is validated with observational data collected over the three-month period of June to August 2020 from 124 GNSS stations in Hunan province, China. Assessments using radiosonde and European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ReAnalysis 5 (ERA5) data demonstrate the better performance of the integrated model against the traditional model using GNSS data alone. In the assessment with radiosonde profiles, the integrated model improves the tomographic solutions upon the traditional model by 40.58% and 36.33% for 30- and 15-min resolutions, respectively. Root mean square errors (RMSEs) of density differences between ERA5 and the integrated model vary from 1.24 to 2.82 g/ <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{m}^{3}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> throughout the study area. RMSEs vertically decrease from <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sim 5$ </tex-math></inline-formula> g/ <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{m}^{3}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> at the bottom to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sim 0.5$ </tex-math></inline-formula> g/ <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{m}^{3}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> at the top layer of about 10 km. This work demonstrates the benefit of high-quality FY-4A products to GNSS tomography because they can effectively mitigate the ill-posed problem of inverse process.