Vertical resolution is a basic problem concerned in the study of atmospheric profile (temperature, moisture and ozone etc.) inversion techniques. In this paper, trade-off studies on signal-to-noise, spectral resolution and spectral coverage are conducted for the Hyperspectral Environmental Suite (HES) on the next generation of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-R). Vertical resolutions are compared between HES and the current GOES Sounder that has only 18 spectral bands. HES has much better temperature and moisture vertical resolutions than the current GOES Sounder. The advantages of the combination of HES and Advanced Microwave Sounding Suite (AMSU), as well as the combination of the current GOES Sounder and AMSU, are explored. Results show the improvement of the vertical resolution from the combination of IR sounder and AMSU over that from the IR sounder alone in the lower stratosphere and the upper troposphere. Using the radiosonde at the ARM CART site as reference, the advantage of high spectral resolution sounder is confirmed by comparing the retrieved profiles from AIRS and the current GOES Sounder.

Key words: vertical resolution, HES, trade off, retrieval