Auto-adaptive Tikhonov regularization of water vapor profiles: application to FORUM measurements

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we study the retrieval of water vapor profiles from simulated FORUM measurements. We show that the bias towards the a-priori introduced by the Optimal Estimation technique can be reduced by using larger errors for the a-priori. Reducing the strength of the a-priori may, however, cause unphysical oscillations in the resulting profiles because of the ill-conditioning of the retrieval problem. An a-posteriori regularization technique, the Iterative Variable Strength method, is thus applied to reduce the amplitude of the oscillations.

KEYWORDS:

• Remote sensing
• radiative transfer inversion
• regularization
• water vapor retrieval
• FORUM

AMS CLASSIFICATIONS:

• 65N21
• 35R30
• 47A52

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).