Volume Emission Rate Tomography from a Satellite Platform

The possibility of retrieving horizontal atmospheric structure from a series of limb images taken aboard a satellite is discussed and a maximum likelihood expectation maximization algorithm is developed. Examples of the retrieval of horizontal structure with this algorithm, for different S /N (signal-to-noise) ratios and different structures, are presented. It is shown that with this algorithm and even in the presence of substantial observational noise, a S /N equal to 10 for a single observation, it is possible to retrieve both horizontal and vertical atmospheric structure.