Analysis of the state of theory and the technology of radio-acoustic atmospheric sounding systems
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30837/rt.2026.1.224.11Keywords:
radio-acoustic atmospheric sounding, method, analysis, adaptation, measurement, systematic error, research, model, temperature, sounding signalAbstract
Radio-Acoustic Sounding Systems (RASS) enable measurements of vertical profiles of key atmospheric parameters, including temperature, wind speed, and turbulence characteristics. However, the development of the method has faced considerable difficulties over several decades. Currently, the field of radio-acoustic atmospheric sounding is experiencing a long-term, systemic crisis that has been ongoing for almost two decades. This crisis is caused by the fact that commercially produced RASS systems provide temperature profiles with acceptable performance and have modern, representative digital interfaces for visualizing the sounding results, while their operational algorithms are proprietary and not described in detail in the literature. Industrial RASS systems are implicitly regarded by the scientific community as sufficiently advanced and therefore are not subjected to critical evaluation. Under these conditions, scientific research in this field has almost come to a standstill and has remained stagnant for the past twenty years. As a result, the state of science and technology in this field has been effectively frozen for two decades.
To address this situation and to revive research in the theory and practice of RASS, this paper provides a qualitative assessment of the current state of the field, analyzes existing sounding systems, evaluates their algorithmic support, and formulates the key tasks required to overcome the crisis. Methods for achieving these goals are also proposed.
The main current task is to improve the methods for measuring vertical profiles of meteorological parameters using RAZ systems, which are based on existing algorithms for processing useful informative signals and on methods for adapting the systems to external conditions.
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