Characteristics of the global thermal tropopause derived from multiple radio occultation measurements

Thermal tropopause represents the region of the atmosphere where the environmental lapse rate changes from tropospheric positive to stratospheric negative. It also defines the altitude of the atmosphere beneath which significant weather perturbations occur except occasional overshooting thunderstorms in the tropical regions. Accordingly, how the temporal and spatial variability of thermal tropopause behaves is of great concern in atmospheric research and, hence, investigated in this study by using radio occultation (RO) observations obtained from seven space missions during the period from May 2001 to April 2013 (with a total of 6,075,359 occultations). While RO observations have been demonstrated to provide precise measurements of temperature profiles of the atmosphere, their results are inter-compared before further use in our analysis, showing expected high-precision observations with mean differences