Deep Retrieval Architecture of Temperature and Humidity Profiles from Ground-Based Infrared Hyperspectral Spectrometer

Temperature and humidity profiles in the atmospheric boundary layer are essential for climate studies. The ground-based infrared hyperspectral spectrometer has the advantage of measuring radiances emitted from the atmosphere at a high temporal and moderate vertical resolution. In this article, the retrieval of temperature and humidity profiles from ground-based infrared hyperspectral observations is exploited. Although existing inversion algorithms based on physical models or statistical learning have made some progress, they still suffer from high computational complexity or poor performance. Motivated by the strength of the deep learning, we present a deep retrieval architecture (DReA) by skillfully designing a light-weight one-dimensional convolution neural network (CNN) to retrieve the temperature and humidity profiles. Experiments were conducted using atmospheric emitted radiance interferometer (AERI) and radiosonde data to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed DReA. The validation of the DReA with the radiosonde, using 802 profiles with 37 layers below 3 km, presents an excellent retrieval ability with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.87 K for the temperature and 1.06 g/kg for the water vapor mixing ratio. Furthermore, a thorough comparison with commonly used inversion methods such as the traditional back propagation (BP) and the eigenvector (EV) regression method, shows that our proposed DReA method obtains a leading solution in retrieving temperature and humidity profiles.