Localization of Structure on Extended RO Propagation Geometries

GPS-to-low-earth-orbiting (LEO) radio occultation (RO) geometries are designed for vertical-plane measurements. Reconstruction of atmospheric and ionospheric pro…les is facilitated by the planar geometry. Interpreting scintillation that develops over the extended propagation path is more challenging. The point of closest approach is a natural reference for reporting scintillation on occultation paths. However, the structure variation provides information that can be exploited to localize the structure along the extended path. Carrano, et al. demonstrated the principle. A companion presentation will discuss more recent results based on Irregularity Parameter Estimation (IPE). A con…guration-space model has been developed that generates ionospheric structure realizations from distributions of magnetic-…eld-aligned striations. The striation size distribution can be structured to generate one or two-component inverse power law spectral distributions. The model can populate a representative volume that captures the occultation plane. The model is being applied to investigate the structure con…gurations that can be resolved by interpreting the occultation intensity variation. Our preliminary results con…rm that the ideal …eld-crossing geometry works well. In this paper we will investigate localization for a range of representative RO geometries.