Radio occultation (RO) sensing is used to probe the earth's atmosphere in order to obtain information about its physical properties. With a main interest in the parameters of the neutral atmosphere, there is the need to perform a correction of the ionospheric contribution to the bending angle. Since this correction is an approximation to first order, there exists an ionospheric residual, which can be expected to be larger when the ionization is high (day versus night, high versus low solar activity). The ionospheric residual systematically affects the accuracy of the atmospheric parameters at low altitudes, at high altitudes (above 25–30 km) it even is an important error source. In climate applications this could lead to a time dependent bias which induces wrong trends in atmospheric parameters at high altitudes. The first goal of our work was to study and characterize this systematic residual error. In a second step we developed a simple correction method, based purely on observational data, to reduce this residual for large ensembles of RO profiles. In order to tackle this problem, we analyzed the bending angle bias of CHAMP and COSMIC RO data from 2001–2011. We could observe that the nighttime bending angle bias stays constant over the whole period of 11 yr, while the daytime bias increases from low to high solar activity. As a result, the difference between nighttime and daytime bias increases from about −0.05 μrad to −0.4 μrad. This behavior paves the way to correct the solar cycle dependent bias of daytime RO profiles. In order to test the newly developed correction method we performed a simulation study, which allowed to separate the influence of the ionosphere and the neutral atmosphere. Also in the simulated data we observed a similar increase in the bias in times from low to high solar activity. In this simulation we performed the climatological ionospheric correction of the bending angle data, by using the bending angle bias characteristics of a solar cycle as a correction factor. After the climatological ionospheric correction the bias of the simulated data improved significantly, not only in the bending angle but also in the retrieved temperature profiles

Abstract. In this study, a new model was explored which corrects for higher order ionospheric residuals in Global Positioning System (GPS) radio occultation (RO) data. Recently, the theoretical basis of this new "residual ionospheric error model" has been outlined (Healy and Culverwell, 2015). The method was tested in simulations with a one-dimensional model ionosphere.The proposed new model for computing the residual ionospheric error is the product of two factors, one of which expresses its variation from profile to profile and from time to time in terms of measurable quantities (the L1 and L2 bending angles), while the other describes the weak variation with altitude. A simple integral expression for the residual error (Vorob'ev and Krasil'nikova, 1994) has been shown to be in excellent numerical agreement with the exact value, for a simple Chapman layer ionosphere. In this case, the "altitudinal" element of the residual error varies (decreases) by no more than about 25 % between ∼ 10 and ∼ 100 km for physically reasonable Chapman layer parameters. For other simple model ionospheres the integral can be evaluated exactly, and results are in reasonable agreement with those of an equivalent Chapman layer.In this follow-up study the overall objective was to explore the validity of the new residual ionospheric error model for more detailed simulations, based on modeling through a complex three-dimensional ionosphere.The simulation study was set up, simulating day and night GPS RO profiles for the period of a solar cycle with and without an ionosphere. The residual ionospheric error was studied, the new error model was tested, and temporal and spatial variations of the model were investigated. The model performed well in the simulation study, capturing the temporal variability of the ionospheric residual. Although it was not possible, due to high noise of the simulated bending-angle profiles at mid-to high latitudes, to perform a thorough latitudinal investigation of the performance of the model, first positive and encouraging results were found at low latitudes. Furthermore, first application tests of the model on the data showed a reduction in temperature level of the ionospheric residual at 40 km from about −2.2 to −0.2 K.

We study spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking and the spectral properties of the staggered lattice Dirac operator using quenched gauge configurations for the exceptional group G 2 , which has a trivial center. In particular we study the system below and above the finite temperature transition and use the temporal boundary conditions of the fermions to probe the system. We evaluate several observables: The spectral density at the origin, the spectral gap, the chiral condensate and the recently proposed dual chiral condensate. We show that chiral symmetry is broken at low temperatures and is restored at high temperatures at the thermodynamic phase transition. Concerning the role of the boundary conditions we establish that in all respects the spectral quantities behave for G 2 in exactly the same way as for SU(N ), when for the latter group the gauge ensemble above T c is restricted to the sector of configurations with real Polyakov loop.

We analytically derive a decomposition of the lattice fermion determinant for Wilson's Dirac operator with chemical potential into winding sectors, i.e., factors with a fixed number of quarks. Dividing the lattice into four domains, the determinant is factorized into terms which can be classified with respect to the winding number of the closed loops they consist of. The individual factors are expressed in terms of subdeterminants and propagators on the domains of the lattice. We numerically analyze properties of the factorization formula and discuss two applications for the determination of canonical partition functions with a fixed quark number: A speedup for the Fourier transformation technique through a dimensional reduction, and a power series expansion.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

Finite temperature lattice QCD is probed by varying the temporal boundary conditions of the fermions. We develop the emerging physical behavior in a study of the quenched case and subsequently present first results for a fully dynamical calculation comparing ensembles below and above the phase transition. We show that for low temperature spectral quantities of the Dirac operator are insensitive to boundary conditions, while in the deconfined phase a non-trivial response to a variation of the boundary conditions sets in.