This article gives an in-depth analysis of the experimental data of the TK-1G sounding rocket installed with the satellite navigation system. It turns out that the data acquisition rate of the rocket sonde is high, making the collection of complete trajectory and meteorological data possible. By comparing the rocket sonde measurements with those obtained by virtue of other methods, we find that the rocket sonde can be relatively precise in measuring atmospheric parameters within the scope of 20–60 km above the ground. This establishes the fact that the TK-1G sounding rocket system is effective in detecting near-space atmospheric environment.

The tropical region is a key area for the interaction between the stratosphere and troposphere. The strong convective activity in the troposphere produces a series of gravity wave activities, which result in strong and widespread turbulence over the region. Therefore, studying the turbulent activity in the western Pacific is essential for understanding the characteristics of atmospheric disturbance over this region, which has the world’s most complex circulation system. In this paper, we explore the characteristics of atmospheric turbulence distribution over Guam in this region, and the Thorpe sorting method is used to study one-second resolution radiosonde data from the US. On the basis of the background field and local instability, the turbulence generation mechanism is discussed in detail. Results show that the US high-resolution balloon data are efficacious for tropospheric turbulence retrieval but increasingly affected by instrument noise as altitude increases. It is also found that there is a strong turbulent mixing band caused by both shear instability and static instability near the tropopause, where the turbulence activity is markedly enhanced and characterized by annual oscillation, reaching the maximum from July to September.

In this article, Thorpe analysis, which often retrieves the characteristics of mixing in the free atmosphere from balloon sounding data, is applied to the data of the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate (COSMIC). We find that the COSMIC data can well retrieve the strongest mixed layer in the troposphere (SMLT) altitude, and can reveal the basic variation trend of the SMLT thickness and Thorpe scale $L_T$ . We use COSMIC data to reveal the global spatial and temporal distribution of the SMLT from 2007 to 2015 and analyze the fluctuation period of the SMLT altitude with Hilbert–Huang transform (HHT), we find that the variation of the SMLT altitude is influenced by the dual effects of terrain and solar radiation.

The problem of atmospheric duct inversion is usually solved as a single objective optimization problem. Based on ground-based Global Positioning System (GPS) phase delay and propagation loss, this paper develops a multi-objective method including the effect of source frequency and receiving antenna height. The diversity and convergence of solution sets are evaluated for seven multi-objective evolutionary algorithms with three performance metrics: Hypervolume (HV), Inverted Generational Distance (IGD), and the averaged Hausdorff distance ( ${\mathsf{\Delta }}_2$ ). The inversion results are compared with the simulation results, and the experimental comparison is conducted on three groups of test situations. The results demonstrate that the ranking of algorithm performance varies because of the different methods used to calculate performance metrics. Moreover, when the algorithms show overwhelming performance using performance metrics, the inversion result is not more close to the real value. In the comparison of computational experiments, it was found that, as the retrieved parameter dimension increases, the inversion result becomes more unstable. When the observed data are sufficient, the inversion result seems to be improved.

In recent years, Thorpe analysis has been used to retrieve the characteristics of turbulence in free atmosphere from balloon-borne sensor data. However, previous studies have mainly focused on the mid-high latitude region, and this method is still rarely applied at heights above 30 km, especially above 35 km. Therefore, seven sets of upper air (>35 km) sounding data from the Changsha Sounding Station (28°12′ N, 113°05′ E), China are analyzed with Thorpe analysis in this article. It is noted that, in the troposphere, Thorpe analysis can better retrieve the turbulence distribution and the corresponding turbulence parameters. Also, because of the thicker troposphere at low latitudes, the values of the Thorpe scale $L_T$ and turbulent energy dissipation rate $\epsilon$ remain greater in a larger height range. In the stratosphere below the height of 35 km, the obtained $\epsilon$ is higher, and Thorpe analysis can only be used to analyze the characteristics of large-scale turbulence. In the stratosphere at a height of 35–40 km, because of the interference of sensor noise, Thorpe analysis can only help to retrieve the rough distribution position of large-scale turbulence, while it can hardly help with the calculation of the turbulence parameters.