INVERSION OF MOISTURE PROFILES BY A NONLINEAR ITERATIVE PHYSICAL RETRIEVAL^*

The Advanced TIROS-N Operational Vertical Sounder(ATOVS) measurements are used to generate the atmospheric parameters,such as temperature and moisture profiles,under both clear and cloudy situations.This paper describes briefly the nonlinear iterative physical retrieval method.By using this retrieval scheme,an experiment has been carried out to retrieve the moisture profiles from ATOVS measurements on the NOAA-16 satellite for July of 2002.ATOVS profile retrieval results are evaluated by root mean square(RMS) differences with respect to RAdiosonde OBservation(RAOB) profiles.The accuracy of the retrieval is about 15%-23% for the relative humidity profile in this study.