Citation
Abstract
Water vapor radiometers measure the sky brightness along a path through the atmosphere. This sky brightness is a combination of the atmospheric “noise” temperature and the cosmic background. By removing the cosmic contribution, the remaining atmospheric noise temperature contribution can be used to infer atmospheric attenuation and atmospheric noise temperature used in telecommunications link budgets. Water vapor radiometer (WVR) data also have been used to calibrate or experimentally characterize atmospheric error sources in phase data gathered from radio science and very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) experiments. A previous article reported on the comparison of atmospheric attenuation derived from WVR data with that estimated from International Telecommunication Union (ITU) models for the three Deep Space Network (DSN) sites. The focus of this current article is to examine and cross-compare the statistics of the meteorological data types (integrated precipitable water vapor, integrated liquid water content, and wet path delay) extracted from the WVR measurements for all three DSN sites. In this article, we will also compare some of the statistical estimates against those available using ITU models and prediction methods.
Details
- Volume
- 42-203
- Published
- November 15, 2015
- Pages
- 1–21
- File Size
- 2.3 MB