This paper addresses the probability of atmospheric refractivity estimation by using field measurements at an array of radio receivers in terms of angle-of-arrival spectrum. Angle-of-arrival spectrum information is simulated by the ray optics model and refractivity is expressed in the presence of an ideal tri-linear profile. The estimation of the refractivity is organized as an optimization problem and a genetic algorithm is used to search for the optimal solution from various trial

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... profiles. Theoretical analysis demonstrates the feasibility of this method to retrieve the refractivity parameters. Simulation results indicate that this approach has a fair anti-noise ability and its accuracy performance is mainly dependent on the antenna aperture size and its positions.