The refractivity in the radio occultation (RO) is generally obtained from the inverse Abel transform (AI) of measured bending angle. While concise and mathematically exact, AI is susceptible to the error present in the measurement. Aiming to reduce the adverse effects of the measurement error, this study proposes a new method for determining the refractivity through a variational regularization (VR). Verification shows that VR offers a definite advantage over AI in the quality of refractivity.