Scientific Applications of Atmospheric Radio Occultations

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and are designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. This specific research opportunity focuses on radio occultation of signals emitted by the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) to estimate vertical profiles of atmospheric density, pressure, temperature and water vapor. Radio occultation provides a unique technique to characterize the thermodynamical state within optically thick clouds, particularly for characterizing thermodynamical conditions within precipitating clouds. The research will explore climate processes that influence precipitation and may combine radio occultation data with other observational techniques that add information on cloud physical variables in presence of precipitation.