Determination of the Temperature Profile in an Atmosphere from its Outgoing Radiance*

A highly convergent relaxation method has been developed for the inversion of the full radiative-transfer equation. The results of the iterative solution indicate that convergence can be achieved over a wide range of initial guesses, enabling the temperature profile of a relatively unknown atmosphere to be unambiguously determined. The method is illustrated by examples for the outgoing radiance in the earth’s atmosphere for the region of the 4.3-μ CO2 band, but can be similarly applied in other frequency ranges.