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Recent work has demonstrated the feasibility of neural network estimation techniques for atmospheric profiling
in partially cloudy atmospheres using combined microwave (MW) and hyperspectral infrared (IR) sounding data.
In this paper, the retrieval performance in problem areas (over land, near the poles, elevated terrain, etc.) is
examined. Retrieval performance has been improved by stratifying the neural network training data into distinct
groups based on geographical (latitude, for example), geophysical (atmospheric pressure, for example), and sensor
geometrical (scan angle, for example) considerations. The spectral information content of cloud signatures in
Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) data is also explored. A Principal Components Analysis
is presented that indicates that most variability due to clouds is contained in the first two eigenvectors.
A novel statistical method for the retrieval of atmospheric temperature and moisture (relative humidity)
profiles has been developed and evaluated with sounding data from the Atmospheric InfraRed Sounder (AIRS)
and the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU). The present work focuses on the cloud impact on the AIRS
radiances and explores the use of stochastic cloud clearing mechanisms together with neural network estimation.
A stand-alone statistical algorithm will be presented that operates directly on cloud-impacted AIRS/AMSU data,
with no need for a physical cloud clearing process. The algorithm is implemented in three stages. First, the
infrared radiance perturbations due to clouds are estimated and corrected by combined processing of the infrared
and microwave data using a Stochastic Cloud Clearing (SCC) approach. The cloud clearing of the infrared
radiances was performed using principal components analysis of infrared brightness temperature contrasts in
adjacent fields of view and microwave-derived estimates of the infrared clear-column radiances to estimate and
correct the radiance contamination introduced by clouds. Second, a Projected Principal Components (PPC)
transform is used to reduce the dimensionality of and optimally extract geophysical profile information from the
cloud-cleared infrared radiance data. Third, an artificial feedforward neural network (NN) is used to estimate
the desired geophysical parameters from the projected principal components.
The performance of this method was evaluated using global (ascending and descending) EOS-Aqua orbits co-located
with ECMWF fields for a variety of days throughout 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006. Over 1,000,000 fields of
regard (3x3 arrays of footprints) over ocean and land were used in the study. The method requires significantly less
computation than traditional variational retrieval methods, while achieving comparable performance. Retrieval
accuracy will be evaluated using ECMWF atmospheric fields as ground truth. The accuracy of the neural network
retrieval method will be compared to the accuracy of the AIRS Level 2 (Version 5) retrieval method.
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