Publications by authors named "Barbara Scherllin-Pirscher"

High-resolution measurements from Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) radio occultation (RO) provide atmospheric profiles with independent information on altitude and pressure. This unique property is of crucial advantage when analyzing atmospheric characteristics that require joint knowledge of altitude and pressure or other thermodynamic atmospheric variables. Here we introduce and demonstrate the utility of this independent information from RO and discuss the computation, uncertainty, and use of RO atmospheric profiles on isohypsic coordinates-mean sea level altitude and geopotential height-as well as on thermodynamic coordinates (pressure and potential temperature).

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Global Positioning System (GPS) radio occultation (RO) measurements are proven highly useful for observing the thermal structure of the troposphere and stratosphere. Here we use RO data for the first time to derive climatological wind fields from sampling error-corrected geopotential height fields on isobaric surfaces from about 800 hPa to 3 hPa. We find monthly mean RO geostrophic wind and gradient wind fields (2007 to 2012, about 500 km horizontal resolution, outside tropics) to clearly capture all main wind features, with differences to atmospheric analysis winds being, in general, smaller than 2 m/s.

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