Retrieval of atmospheric thermodynamical parameters using satellite measurements with a maximum entropy method

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Abstract
A maximum entropy method is applied to retrieve the atmospheric distribution of temperature and humidity on a vertical, when this vertical is remotely observed from a satellite at different wavelengths. Errors in the forward model and in the observations are taken into account. In particular, these errors can be non-Gaussian, and their components may be correlated with each other. The presented technique also ensures that the solution of this inverse problem can be forced to be bounded if this is physically needed (as with atmospheric humidity), without any penalty in numerical cost. A practical application is developed, to retrieve vertical distributions from radiometric observations performed by the NOAA meteorological satellites. Comparisons of the inverted distributions with radiosoundings measurements are discussed.