Geodetic and Atmospheric Background

This first part in the book on atmospheric effects in space geodesy provides a review of the basic structure, composition, and workings of the atmosphere and serves as a general background needed to help the reader understand the material in later parts. Its large diversity of topics would usually not be included in one paper, but since this work is designed as a textbook in a university geodesy course, we intentionally discuss this broad variety of topics at the outset. The reader may wish to skip this part and only revisit it as references and interest suggest. Here we cover the following topics: After an overview of atmospheric effects in space geodesy, we briefly review physical terminology and meteorological quantities. Then, we discuss gas laws and atmospheric statics, and we introduce specific topics like reference pressure, atmospheric tides, and the inverted barometer hypothesis, all of which reappear in later parts. After an overview of atmospheric layers and circulation, we concentrate on the ionosphere, highlighting ionization and recombination processes and introducing the concept of Chapman layer profiles. Finally, we discuss height- and latitude-dependent spatial variations as well as regular and non-regular temporal variations in the ionosphere.