Retrieval of Temperature and Moisture Profiles over Brazil Using the Ici Inversion System

INTRODUCTION The vertical structure of temperature and water vapor plays an important role in the meteorological processes of the atmosphere. For years the radiosonde network has been the primary observing system for monitoring tropospheric temperature and water vapor. However due to logistics and economic problems, there is a lack of observation in several regions of the Earth. For example, in Brazil only a dozen radiosonde launching are done in a daily basis. As a consequence there is almost no data covering the Amazon basin. In this sense, became important the retrievals of temperature and humidity profiles from satellites, for applications such as weather analyzes and data assimilation in numerical weather predictions models. This work shows the ability of ATOVS for retrieving temperature and moisture profiles for different atmospheric conditions over Brazil. The analysis was done using the Inversion Coupled with Image (ICI) model (Lavanant et al. 1999a). To accomplish this work we used 35 days of NOAA-15 satellite data pre-processed with the ATOVS and AVHRR Processing Package (AAPP) model (Klaes 1997; Klaes et al. 1999). The obtained temperature and moistures retrieved profiles are compared with radiosonde profiles for different locations in Brazil. Also the retrieved horizontal fields of temperature and moisture are analyzed for different pressure levels.