The ESA-ANISAP Study: Retrieval of Tropospheric Water Vapour Fields by Using Co-Rotating LEO Satellites

This paper presents a preliminary 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 attenuations measurements over microwave links among the satellites - and tomographic techniques to solve the inverse problem of atmospheric water vapour field reconstruction. This study is undertaken as a task of the on-going research developed under the ESA--ANISAP project. Some simulation results demonstrating the feasibility of the reconstruction of 2-D maps of atmospheric water vapour content are presented.