Representation of vertical atmospheric structures by radio occultation observations in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere: Comparison to high-resolution radiosonde profiles

Horizontal inhomogeneity of real atmosphere results in representativeness errors of retrieved profiles. In most cases these errors increase with a decrease of vertical scales of atmospheric structures and may not allow one to fully utilize the physical resolution of RO.

Also, GPS RO-retrieved profiles are affected by observational noise of different types, which, in turn, affect the representation of small-scale atmospheric structures. This study investigates the effective resolution and optimal smoothing of GPS RO-retrieved temperature profiles using high-pass filtering and cross correlation with collocated high-resolution radiosondes. The effective resolution is a trade-off between representation of real atmospheric structures and suppression of observational noise, which varies for different latitudes (15 degrees S-75 degrees N) and altitudes (10-27 km).