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 observations. It contains the temperature component weighting function and absorbing constituent (H2O, O3, CH4 etc.) component 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.