After successful launch in November 2018 and successful commissioning of Metop-C , all three satellites of the EUMETSAT Polar System (EPS) are in orbit together and operational. EPS is part of the Initial Joint Polar System (IJPS) with the United States (NOAA) and provides the service in the midmorning orbit. The Metop satellites carry a mission payload of sounding and imaging instruments, which allow provision of support to operational meteorology and climate monitoring, which are the main mission objectives for EPS. Applications include numerical weather prediction, atmospheric composition monitoring, and marine meteorology. Climate monitoring is supported through the generation of long time series through the program duration of 20+ years. The payload was developed and contributed by partners, including NOAA, CNES, and ESA. EUMETSAT and ESA developed the space segment in cooperation. The system has proven its value since the first satellite Metop-A , with enhanced products at high reliability for atmospheric sounding, delivered a very strong positive impact on NWP and results beyond expectations for atmospheric composition and chemistry applications. Having multiple satellites in orbit—now three—has enabled enhanced and additional products with increased impact, like atmospheric motion vector products at latitudes not accessible to geostationary observations or increased probability of radio occultations and hence atmospheric soundings with the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Radio-Occultation Atmospheric Sounder (GRAS) instruments. The paper gives an overview of the system and the embarked payload and discusses the benefits of generated products for applications and services. The conclusions point to the follow-on system, currently under development and assuring continuity for another 20+ years.

Since the launch of the second Metop platform in September 2012, two IASI (Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometers) instruments are flying on the same orbit, overflying the same area with 50 minutes delay. This provides a unique opportunity to perform multiple inter-comparisons and cross-monitoring. To do so, different methodologies have been implemented to provide complementary results giving qualitative and quantitative information on the instruments in terms of radiometric and spectral inter-calibration. This includes in particular comparisons between IASI and other infrared instruments. In this paper we will present an overview of the comparison that have been performed between IASI and the High-resolution Infrared Sounder (HIRS) flying on the same platform as well as comparisons with the Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS) flying on Suomi-NPP. This monitoring which, besides giving confidence on the intercalibration of both IASI, provides a way to detect the slightest differences between IASI and other infrared multispectral instruments.

Clouds play an important role in the radiative transfer of planetary atmospheres: they are key elements of the climate system and influence the planet’s spectral appearance. Given the thousands of exoplanets discovered so far, including some dozens of Earth-sized exoplanets, the feasibility of remote sensing of exoplanet atmospheres is attracting increasing attention. Here we present a study of the thermal emission of cloud-covered Earth-like exoplanets orbiting in the habitable zone of F, G, K, and M-type stars. A line-by-line model for molecular absorption has been coupled to a discrete ordinate multiple scattering radiative transfer solver. Pressure, temperature, and molecular concentration profiles were taken from a consistent radiative-convective climate model including a parameterized cloud description (Kitzmann et al., A&A, 2010). The main focus of the current work is the impact of multi-layer clouds on emission spectra in the thermal infrared. The effects of low-level water clouds and high level ice clouds simultaneously on signatures of H2 O, CO2 , O3 , etc will be studied for various resolutions. Furthermore, comparisons with spectra resulting from a low-resolution code will be shown.

Jacobians, i.e. partial derivatives of the radiance and transmission spectrum with respect to the atmospheric state parameters to be retrieved from remote sensing observations, are important for the iterative solution of the nonlinear inverse problem. Finite difference Jacobians are easy to implement, but computationally expensive and possibly of dubious quality; on the other hand, analytical Jacobians are accurate and efficient, but the implementation can be quite demanding. GARLIC, our “Generic Atmospheric Radiation Line-by-line Infrared Code”, utilizes algorithmic differentiation (AD) techniques to implement derivatives w.r.t. atmospheric temperature and molecular concentrations. In this paper, we describe our approach for differentiation of the high resolution infrared and microwave spectra and provide an in-depth assessment of finite difference approximations using “exact” AD Jacobians as a reference. The results indicate that the “standard” two-point finite differences with 1K and 1% perturbation for temperature and volume mixing ratio, respectively, can exhibit substantial errors, and central differences are significantly better. However, these deviations do not transfer into the truncated singular value decomposition solution of a least squares problem. Nevertheless, AD Jacobians are clearly recommended because of the superior speed and accuracy.

GARLIC has been developed with emphasis on efficient and reliable numerical algorithms and a modular approach appropriate for simulation and/or retrieval in a variety of applications. It is suitable for arbitrary observation geometry, instrumental field-of-view, and line shape. The core of GARLIC's subroutines constitutes the basis of forward models used to implement inversion codes to retrieve atmospheric state parameters from limb and nadir sounding instruments. In view of the computational burden of lbl modeling considerable effort has been devoted to optimized algorithms. Collision induced absorption has been implemented as a complement of the H2O, CO2, etc continua. Furthermore, the DISORT multiple-scattering solver has been added to GARLIC for an assessment of the impact of clouds on exoplanet spectra. As a recent upgrade Jacobians with respect to temperature have been implemented utilizing algorithmic differentiation. In this contribution we summarize GARLIC's main features and give some examples from Earth and planetary science.

More than one thousand exoplanets have been discovered in the past two decades, with some dozen of them in the host stars’ habitable zone and with size and mass similar to Earth. Furthermore, spectra of exoplanets become available with reasonable quality (resolution and noise) that trigger the question of remote sensing of the planet’s atmosphere. The objective of this sensitivity study is to identify the optimal state vector representing the atmosphere in the inverse problem. Solving the inverse problem will ultimately allow to characterize the planet and determine its habitability. Using a high resolution infrared radiative transfer code with a line-by-line molecular absorption model, we calculate synthetic spectra of exoplanets orbiting dwarf stars. Key parameters describing the atmosphere (i.e., molecular abundances, temperature, pressure) are identified and the Jacobians (i.e. partial derivatives of the spectra) are evaluated to investigate the feasibility to retrieve the state of the planetary atmosphere.

A suite of programs for high resolution infrared-microwave atmospheric radiative transfer modeling has been developed with emphasis on efficient and reliable numerical algorithms and a modular approach appropriate for simulation and/or retrieval in a variety of applications. The Generic Atmospheric Radiation Line-by-line Infrared Code - GARLIC - is suitable for arbitrary observation geometry, instrumental field-of-view, and line shape. The core of GARLIC's subroutines constitutes the basis of forward models used to implement inversion codes to retrieve atmospheric state parameters from limb and nadir sounding instruments.This paper briefly introduces the physical and mathematical basics of GARLIC and its descendants and continues with an in-depth presentation of various implementation aspects: An optimized Voigt function algorithm combined with a two-grid approach is used to accelerate the line-by-line modeling of molecular cross sections; various quadrature methods are implemented to evaluate the Schwarzschild and Beer integrals; and Jacobians, i.e. derivatives with respect to the unknowns of the atmospheric inverse problem, are implemented by means of automatic differentiation. For an assessment of GARLIC's performance, a comparison of the quadrature methods for solution of the path integral is provided. Verification and validation are demonstrated using intercomparisons with other line-by-line codes and comparisons of synthetic spectra with spectra observed on Earth and from Venus. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This work shows the capability of observing Venus with a sensor originally designed for Earth remote sensing. SCIAMACHY (SCanning Imaging Absorption spectroMeter for Atmospheric CHartographY), onboard ENVISAT, successfully observed visible and near-infrared spectra from the Venusian atmosphere. The Venus spectra were simulated using a line-by-line radiative transfer model. The single scattering approximation was applied in order to consider the effects of an approximately 20km-thick haze layer above the main cloud deck, which was considered as a reflecting cloud located in the upper atmosphere of the planet. CO2 absorption lines could be distinguished in both observed and simulated spectra and a good agreement between them was also found.

Context. The atmosphere of Earth-like extrasolar planets orbiting different types of stars is influenced by the spectral dependence of the incoming stellar radiation. The changes in structure and composition affect atmospheric radiation, hence the spectral appearance of these exoplanets.Aims. We provide a thorough investigation of infrared radiative transfer in cloud-free exoplanets atmospheres by not only analyzing the planetary spectral appearance but also discussing the radiative processes behind the spectral features in detail and identifying the regions in the atmosphere that contribute most at a given wavelength.Methods. Using cloud-free scenarios provided by a one-dimensional radiative-convective steady-state atmospheric model, we computed high-resolution infrared transmission and emission spectra, as well as weighting functions for exoplanets located within the habitable zone of F, G, K, and M stars by means of a line-by-line molecular absorption model and a Schwarzschild solver for the radiative transfer. The monochromatic spectra were convolved with appropriate spectral response functions to study the effects of finite instrument resolution.Results. Spectra of the exoplanets of F, G, K, and M stars were analyzed in the 4.5 mu m N2O band, the 4.3 mu m and 15 mu m CO2 bands, the 7.7 mu m CH4 band, the 6.3 mu m H2O band, and the 9.6 mu m O-3 band. Differences in the state of the atmosphere of the exoplanets clearly show up in the thermal infrared spectra; absorption signatures known from Earth can be transformed to emission features (and vice versa). Weighting functions show that radiation in the absorption bands of the uniformly mixed gases (CO2, CH4, N2O) and (to some extent) ozone comes from the stratosphere and upper troposphere, and also indicate that changes in the atmospheres can shift sources of thermal radiation to lower or higher altitudes. Molecular absorption and/or emission features can be identified in the high-resolution spectra of all planets and in most reduced resolution spectra.Conclusions. Insight into radiative transfer processes is essential for analyzing exoplanet spectral observations; for instance, understanding the impact of the temperature profile (nb. non-existence of an inversion) on the CO2 bands facilitates their interpretation and can help avoid false positive or negative estimates of O-3. The detailed analysis of the radiation source and sink regions could even help give an indication about the feasibility of identifying molecular signatures in cloud-covered planets, i.e. radiation mainly coming from the upper atmosphere is less likely to be hidden by clouds. Infrared radiative transfer and biomarker detectability in cloud-covered exoplanets will be presented in a companion paper.

For an investigation of the potential habitability of terrestrial exo-planets the spectroscopic characterization of the planetary atmosphere and the identification of biomarker signatures is crucial. The radiative transfer is critically dependent on atmospheric (pressure, temperature, composition) and surface conditions. In particular, clouds can have a large impact on the planetary spectra (intensities and shapes) due to extinction events. Here the effects of the presence of clouds in Earth-like planetary atmosphere are studied with a high resolution radiative transfer model and compared to low and moderate resolution spectra. Infrared transmission and emission spectra are modeled using a combination of a line-by-line (lbl) molecular absorption code with a multiple scattering radiative transfer solver. Temperature profiles and low resolution spectra for Earth-like planets around different types of central stars have been taken from a radiative-convectiveclimate model with a parametrized cloud description (see Kitzmann et al. 2010, AA, Vol 511, A66). The new lbl-multiple scattering code was tested successfully with respect to consistency to a low resolution radiative transfer code and by comparisions with Venus observations. The dependency of biomarker signatures on the presence of low-level water and high-level ice clouds is studied, e.g. for the thermal infrared band of ozone at 9.6 micrometer. Results indicate the important impact of clouds on the detectability of biomarkermolecules by dampening their spectral signatures. Furthermore, biosignatures may be lost in low resolution spectra leading to false negative classification, i.e. high resolution lbl modeling is mandatory for an assessment of detection feasibility. Hence systematic high resolution studies have to be pursued covering other (UV, Vis, NIR) spectral ranges of interest (other biomolecules).

Clouds have an impact on the radiative transfer in planetary atmospheres by changing the planetary spectra (intensities and shapes) due to extinction events. Thereby, they influence the atmospheric and surface temperatures and can also generate false negative biomarker signatures.

SCIAMACHY (Scanning Imaging Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography) onboard ENVISAT successfully captured visible and near-infrared spectra of sunlight scattered and reflected from Venus atmosphere. Observations took place in March, when SCIAMACHY captured light mainly from the limb of Venus, and in June 2009, when a larger fraction of the planetary disk was illuminated representing a nadir viewing. Venus spectra were simulated using a line-by-line radiative transfer model, which also takes into account single scattering from atmospheric particles and molecules. Comparing SCIAMACHY’s Venus observations with modeled spectra serves as a test for radiative transfer modeling of planetary atmospheres, an essential prerequisite for the search of living planets.