38. Monitoring of the Neutral Atmosphere

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based atmosphere sounding techniques have become a widely recognized and operationally used remote sensing tool. A major milestone of this development was the beginning of the continuous use of GNSS data for improving regional and global forecasts in 2006. The principle behind these techniques is the utilization of atmospheric propagation effects on the GNSS signals on their way from the navigation satellites to receivers on the ground or aboard satellites. The atmosphere delays the time of arrival and introduces a curvature of the signal path. These effects can be accurately estimated and be used for the monitoring of the atmospheric variability. There are two different observation geometries. Therefore, we focus in the first part of this chapter on ground-based networks which are used to estimate the amount of water vapor above each receiver site. The second part deals with the use of radio occultation measurements from GNSS receivers aboard low Earth orbit satellites for global atmosphere sounding. We introduce and describe both techniques which provide observations suitable for the short-term weather forecasting and the long-term time series for climate research and monitoring.