Abstract

During the past decade considerable progress has been made in the passive IR remote sounding of the vertical temperature profiles of the atmosphere. However, most of the sounders are low spectral resolution instruments, leading to low vertical resolution. The information derived from those sounders are useful, but falls short of the requirements for numerical weather forecasting models mainly because of the insufficient vertical resolution and cloud contamination effects. The limitation in vertical resolution is caused partly by the broadness of contribution functions of the current instruments which is due partly to their low spectral resolution. When the contribution functions are broad, emitted energy reaching the sounder in each channel will have components originating from a thick layer of the atmosphere, making reconstruction of fine-scale vertical structures practically impossible. One way to decrease the width of the contribution function is to go to instruments of much higher spectral resolution, which are able to resolve the individual spectral lines. The Fabry-Perot Interferometer (FPI) is one of the instruments that can provide the high spectral resolution required.

© 1990 Optical Society of America