Atmospheric inversion methods of GPS radio occultation

GPS radio occultation is a new technique to explore the global atmosphere. Both the inversion methods of geometric optics and full spectrum inversion are described in detail. The geometric optics method is a classic inversion method used before. The full spectrum inversion can deal with the multi-path propagation problem frequently occurring in the lower atmosphere where the classic method usually becomes inefficient. A new inversion scheme that combines the geometric optics method and the full spectrum inversion method is proposed for atmospheric radio occultation inversion. It is applied to data processing with one GPS/MET radio occultation event data and one CHAMP event data, and successfully obtains atmospheric parameter profiles, which suggest the combined method is an efficient inversion scheme.