Development of a curved ray tracing method for modeling of phase paths from GPS radio occultation: A two-dimensional study

The method, designed to achieve improvements in both computational efficiency and accuracy over conventional straight-line methods, takes rays' first-order bending into account to better describe curved raypaths in the stratified atmosphere. CRT is then used to simulate the phase path from GPS radio occultation (RO).

The merit of the ray tracing approach in GPS RO is explicit consideration of horizontal variation in the atmosphere, which may lead to a sizable error but is disregarded in traditional retrieval schemes. In addition, direct modeling of the phase path takes advantage of simple error characteristics in the measurement. With provision of ionospheric and neutral atmospheric refractive indices, in this effort, rays are traced along the full range of GPS-low Earth orbiting (LEO) radio links just as the measurements are made in real life.