2007: Preconditions to ground based GPS water vapour tomography, Annales Geophysicae

Abstract. The GPS water vapour tomography is a new tech-nique which provides spatially resolved water vapour distri-butions in the atmosphere under all weather conditions. This work investigates the information contained in a given set of GPS signals as a precondition to an optimal tomographic reconstruction. The spatial distribution of the geometric in-tersection points between different ray paths is used to esti-mate the information density. Different distributions of in-tersection points obtained from hypothetical GPS networks with varying densities of GPS stations are compared with respect to the horizontal and vertical resolution of a subse-quent tomographic reconstruction. As a result some mini-mum requirements for continuously operating extensive GPS networks for meteorological applications are given