Simultaneous Non-linear Retrieval of Atmospheric Temperature and Absorbing Constituent Profiles from Satellite Infrared Sounder Radiances

Based on Zeng’s theory (1974), a successive linearized form of radiative transfer equation (RTE) is derived for simultaneous retrieval of atmospheric temperature and absorbing constituent profiles from satellite infrared observa-tions. It contains the temperature component weighting function and absorbing constituent (H2O, O3, CH4 etc.) com-ponent weighting functions. All these weighting functions reach maximum at their own “optimum information levels”, and make the remote sensing equations well-conditional. Then the atmospheric profiles are derived by Newton’s non-linear iteration method. Experiments of retrieval from both TIROS-N operational High Resolution Infrared Sounder (HIRS) and the simulated Atmospheric infRared Sounder (AIRS) show an significant improvement.