Comparison of inversion techniques for limb-sounding radiometric systems

PULIAFITO, ENRIQUE

Helsinki, Finland

Simposio; IGARSS'91; 1991

IEEE

A linear constrained and non-linear iterative retrieving technique were tested to evaluate the most adequate inversion method for the limb sounding radiometric observations. To compare these methods a set of 25 ozone profiles and 25 water vapor profiles were used to simulate two sets of brightness temperatures, one set under ideal conditions and the other one under real conditions, i.e. adding the expected random noise variances. The comparison shows that under ideal conditions, the deviation (rms) of the retrieved O3 and H2O height profiles with the ?true? input profiles were less than 2% between 30 and 70 km, with negligible difference between the different methods. The non-linear iterative inversion methods give the best results when random noise were added to the simulated brightness temperatures (less than 10% between 30-70 km). Under both conditions (ideal and with random noise) the retrieved profiles showed larger deviations between 15 and 30 km above 70 km (about 15%).