Simultaneous temperature and water vapour profile from IASI radiances

The Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) has 8461 potential channels to be exploited for inversions of geophysical parameters. In this paper we analyse two different strategies for their reduction. The first one looks for suitable spectral ranges where the inverse problem is as linear as possible; the second one is based on the cluster analysis theory. Our aim is to minimise the potential information loss evaluated by directly comparing the retrieved temperature and water vapour profiles on a complete set of test atmospheres.