Turbulence in planetary occultations: II. Effects on atmospheric profiles derived from Doppler measurements

Turbulence in planetary atmospheres leads to both fluctuating and systematic errors in atmospheric profiles derived from Doppler measurements during radio occultation. If the upper atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter are about as turbulent as the earth's troposphere, we deduce rms fractional errors in temperature and pressure of less than ～ 10^?2 for the Mariner 10 and Pioneer 10/11 occultation experiments. Fractional systematic errors are typically of the order of 10^?6. These estimates depende rather weakly on quantities characterizing the atmosphere and the occultation, and it is conjectured that turbulence-induced errors in atmospheric profiles derived from Doppler measurements are always very small in the weak scattering limit