9:30 AM - 9:45 AM
[PCG21-09] Detailed temperature structure of the Venusian atmosphere revealed by radio holographic analysis of radio occultation data
Keywords:Venus, radio occultation, FSI
Radio holographic methods have been proposed for processing of RO signals in multipath regions and obtaining atmospheric profiles with high resolution. One of them is the Full Spectrum Inversion (FSI), which was recently applied to GPS occultation data of the Earth’s atmosphere. By applying the FSI technique to ESA’s Venus Express RO data, we demonstrated the applicability of this technique to Venus’ atmosphere.
The new vertical temperature profiles obtained by FSI technique seem to well repro- duce the temperature structure in the multipath region and achieve high vertical resolution (∼150 m). Thin, near-neutral layers were found in the high-resolution static stability pro- files in the high latitude. This feature can be attributed to generation of turbulent layers by breaking gravity waves. The static stability profile in the middle and high latitude tends to show sharp transition from neutral stratification below ∼60 km to stable stratification above, suggesting that the convective layer and the overlying stable layer are adjacent to each other with a very thin transition region. Such a condition is favorable to convective generation of gravity waves.