Tomographic techniques for the retrieval of tropospheric water vapour fields by using co-rotating LEO satellites

This paper presents a study for the estimation of 2-D maps of atmospheric water vapour content from integrated water vapour measurements carried out by a constellation of co-rotating low earth orbit satellites. The proposed method uses the normalised differential spectral attenuation (NDSA) approach - able to achieve integrated water vapour content information from attenuation measurements over microwave links among the satellites - and tomographic techniques to solve the inverse problem of atmospheric water vapour field reconstruction. Simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach to retrieve a 2-D map of the atmospheric water vapour content. This study has been developed under the framework of the ANISAP project funded by the European Space Agency.