Optimal estimation of temperature profiles using a subset of IASI channels

A longtime goal of the satellite sounding community has been to achieve good quality and high vertical resolution temperature and water vapor profiles in the lower stratosphere and troposphere. The Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) is scheduled to fly aboard the METOP satellite in 2003 and shows excellent promise to achieve these goals.

In this poster, retrieval results from an optimal estimation approach are presented. Information content theory is applied to the full IASI spectrum which is pre-divided according to the channels' peak level of contribution. Results using apriori profile information from the TIGR-3 dataset are presented. Error characterization as well as effects of noise in the retrievals are discussed.