Satellite Observation of Atmosphere and Surface Interaction Parameters

Abstract

Several important land, atmosphere, and ocean surface parameters are being derived from weather satellite data acquired by the High Resolution Infrared Sounder (HIRS) and the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU). The parameters thus far derived from these two instruments correspond to the entire year 1979 and the months of March and July 1982. They include: atmospheric temperature and humidity profiles, ocean and land skin surface temperatures, cloud amount, cloud top pressure, temperature, and ice and snow cover. The numerical retrieval algorithm used is based on the iterative relaxation method, which is fundamentally different from statistically based methods. Rather than rely on empirical relationships between satellite observations and meteorological conditions, the relaxation approach finds the solution by iterating until the calculated outgoing radiances, obtained by substituting the iterative atmospheric and surface parameters into the radiative transfer equation, match the observations to a specified accuracy.