Simultaneous temperature and water vapor profile from IASI radiances

The IASI has 8461 potential channels to be exploited for inversions of geophysical parameters. In this paper we analyze two different strategies for their reduction. The first one looks for suitable spectral ranges where the inverse problem is as linear as possible; the second one is based on the cluster analysis theory. Our aim is to minimize the potential information loss evaluated by directly comparing the retrieved temperature and water vapor profiles on a complete set of test atmospheres.