EVALUATION OF UNCERTAINTY IN GRAVITY WAVES POTENTIAL ENERGY CALCULATIONS THROUGH GPS RADIO OCCULTATION MEASUREMENTS

LUNA, D.; DE LA TORRE, A.; ALEXANDER, P.

Congreso; COSPAR; 2012

The application of the global positioning system (GPS) radio occultation (RO) method to the atmosphere enables the determination of height profiles of temperature, among other variables. From these measurements, gravity wave activity is usually quantified by calculating the potential energy through the integration of the ratio of perturbation and background temperatures between two given altitudes in each profile. The uncertainty in the estimation of wave activity depends on the systematic biases and random errors of the measured temperature, but also on additional factors: the selected integration layer, the separation method between background and perturbation temperatures and possible representation errors as given for example by different line of sights of the RO. In this study, the contributions of different parameters and variables to the potential energy uncertainty are investigated and quantified. In particular, a Monte Carlo method is used to test the sensitivity of the total uncertainty with respect to different GPS RO observational error models.