An improvement to high-spectral-resolution infrared cloud-top altitude retrievals is compared to existing retrieval methods and cloud lidar measurements. The new method, CO2 sorting, determines optimal channel pairs to which the CO2 slicing retrieval will be applied. The new retrieval is applied to aircraft Scanning High-Resolution Interferometer Sounder (S-HIS) measurements. The results are compared to existing passive retrieval methods and coincident Cloud Physics Lidar (CPL) measurements. It is demonstrated that when CO2 sorting is used to select channel pairs for CO2 slicing there is an improvement in the retrieved cloud heights when compared to the CPL for the optically thin clouds (total optical depths less than 1.0). For geometrically thick but tenuous clouds, the infrared retrieved cloud tops underestimated the cloud height, when compared to those of the CPL, by greater than 2.5 km. For these cases the cloud heights retrieved by the S-HIS correlated closely with the level at which the CPL-integrated cloud optical depth was approximately 1.0.
[1] This paper describes the application of principal component analysis to reduce the random noise present in the hyperspectral infrared observations. Within a set of spectral observations the number of components needed to characterize the atmosphere is far less than the number of wavelengths observed, typically by a factor between 50 and 70. The higher-order components, which mainly serve to characterize noise, can be eliminated along with the noise that they characterize. The results obtained depend on the variability of the selected sets of observations and on specific instrument characteristics such as spectral resolution and noise statistics. For a set of 10,000 Fourier transform spectrometer (FTS) simulated spectra, whose standard deviation is about 10% of the mean, we were able to obtain noise reduction factors between 5 and 8. Results obtained from real FTS, with standard deviation of about 10% of the mean, indicated practical noise reduction between 5 and 6. To avoid loss of information in the presence of highly deviant observations, it is necessary to use a conservative number of principal components higher than the optimum to maximum noise reduction. However, even then, noise reduction factors of 4 are still achievable.
The problem of reducing the dimensionality of infrared atmospheric sounding interferometer (IASI) data space through a suitable transform and performing the retrieval process for thermodynamical parameters within the transformed data space is addressed in this paper. The reduction of dimensionality is performed with the principal components transform, which allows us to represent the full IASI spectrum with a few coefficients of the expansion. This truncated expansion could have a twofold beneficial effect: (i) it could improve the present exploitation and performance of IASI data for the retrieval of temperature and moisture; and (ii) it could save transmission bandwidth, data rate and costs for the dissemination to users of IASI data. A suitable form of the inverse/forward model completely embedded in the transformed space has been derived and applied to simulated and real IASI data. This methodology has allowed us to assess the IASI performance for temperature, water vapor and ozone based on the full IASI spectral coverage. The use of back-transformed spectral radiances (i.e. the filtered radiances obtained by the truncated expansion) instead of expansion coefficients has also been addressed and assessed. Retrieval exercises performed in simulation and with real observations lead us to conclude that the principal components space-based inverse approach is potentially superior over the current practice of using sparse channels. Copyright
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