A detailed treatment of the effects of these various errors for the recovery of the zonal wind height profile may be found in Atkinson et al. In order to better understand the limitations of the recovery algorithm, we numerically simulated the wind recoveries for a variety of different trajectories, wind environments and errors. Here we summarize the results from several of those simulations and compare the recovered wind profile to the ideal case, where no frequency errors, trajectory uncertainties or anomalous wind regions exist. The input errors used in the simulations of Fig. 5 were representative for the Huygens descent on Titan. In spite of the nonnegligible trajectory and frequency errors, the recovered wind profiles in Fig. 5 are very good facsimilies of the input profiles.
Differences are only apparent in the upper levels of the atmosphere on the scale of the graph.
The errors decrease during the probe descent - in these simulations constrained to be zero at Titan's surface. Since the drift speed can be higher than the vertical descent velocity, the flight path to the surface can become rather flat. Additional simulations verified that the wind recovery algorithm is not affected by an input wind profile with a region of high shear, i.e., the wind recovery is not limited to smooth and slowly varying horizontal winds.