Advancements in remote sensing of the atmosphere

Abstract

The infrared methods developed in the last two decades for the remote sensing of atmospheric parameters by infrared sensors installed aboard orbiting (research and operational) and geostationary (operational) satellites have resulted in numerous meteorological interpretations allowed by the continuous monitoring of cloud and earth surface emission. Also, the inversion methods, in which atmospheric radiances simultaneously observed at several wavelengths in the same general absorption band are used to estimate the vertical profile of temperature or concentration of atmospheric gases, have been further applied to the observation of the vertical profiles of atmospheric temperature and water vapor content.The results have shown that, in a cloud‐free atmosphere, tropospheric temperature measurements done by satellite are acceptable but have a limited ability to show low level temperature inversions. Except for the case of thin cirrus, clouds are always considered as emitting black body radiation so that their infrared emission observed in the 10 microns atmospheric window is easily converted into temperature at their top.