Approaches for Retrieving Sulfur Species Abundances from Dual X–Ka-band Radio Occultations of Venus with EnVision and VERITAS

Abstract

Abstract The EnVision and VERITAS missions to Venus will fly with X- and Ka-band telecommunications channels, which can be used to conduct radio occultation studies of Venus’ atmosphere. While link attenuation measurements during prior S- and X-band occultation experiments have been used to determine vertical profiles of H2SO4 vapor abundance, the addition of the Ka-band channel introduces greater sensitivity to the abundances of H2SO4 aerosols and SO2 gas, permitting the retrieval of their vertical profiles from dual-band measurements. Such measurements would be valuable in the assessment of chemical and dynamical processes governing short- and long-term variability in Venus’ atmosphere. This paper considers the sensitivity of the X–Ka-band radio attenuation measurement to these atmospheric constituents, as well as uncertainties and regularization approaches for conducting retrievals of these atmospheric sulfur species from future occultation experiments. We introduce methods for seeding maximum likelihood estimation retrievals using shape models and simple atmospheric transport constraints. From simulated retrievals, we obtain mean errors of the order of 0.5 ppm, 20 ppm, and 10 mg m−3 for H2SO4 vapor, SO2, and H2SO4 aerosol abundances, respectively, for simultaneous retrieval.