Probabilistic tomography of atmospheric parameters from GNSS data

• Main Author: Ortolani, Alberto <1969>
• Other Authors: Rizzi, Rolando
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: en
• Published: Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna 2011
• Subjects: FIS/06 Fisica per il sistema terra e il mezzo circumterrestre
• Online Access: http://amsdottorato.unibo.it/3922/

The objective of the work is the evaluation of the potential capabilities of navigation satellite signals to retrieve basic atmospheric parameters. A capillary study have been performed on the assumptions more or less explicitly contained in the common processing steps of navigation signals. A probabilistic procedure has been designed for measuring vertical discretised profiles of pressure, temperature and water vapour and their associated errors. Numerical experiments on a synthetic dataset have been performed with the main objective of quantifying the information that could be gained from such approach, using entropy and relative entropy as testing parameters. A simulator of phase delay and bending of a GNSS signal travelling across the atmosphere has been developed to this aim.