Application of dynamical error estimation for statistical optimization of radio occultation bending angles

In order for this technique to work optimally, the error covariance of the observations and the error covariance of the first guess must be known. This is generally not the case, and it is therefore common practice to assume that each of these errors is uncorrelated.

In this study, it is shown that when this assumption is applied together with dynamical error estimation, it is important to account for the fact that first guess and the observation bending angle errors are not damped equally when refractivity profiles are computed through the Abel transform. It is demonstrated that this difference in damping can be accounted for by scaling the ratio of observation to first-guess bending angle error variances.