Vertical grid of retrieved atmospheric profiles

The choice of the vertical grid of atmospheric profiles retrieved from remote sensing observations is discussed considering the two cases of profiles used to represent the results of individual measurements and of profiles used for subsequent data fusion applications. An ozone measurement of the MIPAS instrument is used to assess, for different vertical grids, the quality of the retrieved profiles in terms of profile values, retrieval errors, vertical resolutions and number of degrees of freedom. In the case of individual retrievals no evident advantage is obtained with the use of a grid finer than the one with a reduced number of grid points, which are optimized according to the information content of the observations. Nevertheless, this instrument dependent vertical grid, which seems to extract all the available information, provides very poor results when used for data fusion applications. A loss of about a quarter of the degrees of freedom is observed when the data fusion is made using the instrument dependent vertical grid relative to the data fusion made using a vertical grid optimized for the data fusion product. This result is explained by the analysis of the eigenvalues of the Fisher information matrix and leads to the conclusion that different vertical grids must be adopted when data fusion is the expected application.