Atmospheric remote sensing and radiative Transfer

Continuous global observations are indispensible for monitoring the Earth's atmosphere, understanding processes, and also verifying simulation results. Satellite-based remoste sensing measurements provide as vast amount of information. The relevant information for atmospheric science, such as atmospheric composition, i.e. temperature, trace gas concentrations, cloud occurence, and aerosol composition, can be derived from remote sensing data. For this purpose the Simulation and Data Lab Climate Science developed the radiative transfer and retieval model JURASSIC (Juelich Rapid Spectral Simulation Code).

JURASSIC is designed for the mid-infrared spectral region (approx. 4 - 20µm) and can work with nadir and limb measurements at day and night time. It is used to derive temperatures (e.g. Wright et al., 2022), atmospheric trace gas concentrations (e.g Hoffmann et al., 2008, Hoffmann and Alexander, 2009), aerosol composition (e.g. Griessbach et al. 2014, 2016; Hoffmann et al., 2014) and clouds (e.g. Zou et al., 2020) from satellite instruments, such as AIRS and MIPAS, or air-bourne remote sensing instruments, such as CRISTA-NF (e.g. Hoffmann et al., 2009; Kalicinsky et al. 2021) and GLORIA (e.g. Ungermann et al., 2010 ). It is also used to study the measurement capabilities of planned future remote sensing instruments. JURASSIC is continuously developed further to extend its modelling capabilities and to efficiently exploit current and future HPC systems, such as GPUs (Pozgaj, 2022).