The couple-inversion of atmospheric profile and surface temperature and emissivity from MODIS data

A couple-inversion algorithm that retrieves geophysical parameters from MODIS measurements was developed. The retrieved geophysical parameters include atmospheric temperature-humidity profiles, pixel-averaged surface temperature and emissivity within the thermal infrared regions (6∼16 μm). The Modtran atmospheric radiative transfer code was used to simulate the measured radiances and atmospheric transmittance. Then the genetic algorithm was employed to generate a regularization solution that updates the first-guesses of atmospheric temperature, water-vapor profiles, surface skin temperature and emissivity. The algorithm proposed in this paper was first tested with simulated data.