Preprocessing of the Direct-broadcast Data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) Sounding Suite on Aqua Satellite

We present a pre p rocessing system for the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) sounding suite onboard Aqua satellite. With its unprecedented 2378 channels in IR bands, AIRS aims at achieving the sounding accuracy [s1]of a radiosonde (1 K in 1-km layer for temperature and 10% in 2-km layer for humidity). The core of the pre p rocessor is the International MODIS/AIRS Processing Package (IMAPP) that performs the geometric and radiometric correction to compute the Earth’ s radiance. Then we remove spurious data and retrieve the brightness temperature (Tb). Since we process the direct-broadcast data almost for the first time among the AIRS directbroadcast community, special attention is needed to understand and verify the products. This includes the pixel-to-pixel verification of the direct-broadcast product with reference to the fullorbit product, which shows the difference of less than 10 -3 K in IR Tb.