Radiative transfer speed-up combining optimal spectral sampling with a
machine learning approach
Abstract
The Orbiting Carbon Observatories-2 and 3 make space-based measurements
in the oxygen A-band and the weak and strong carbon dioxide (CO2) bands.
A Bayesian optimal estimation approach is employed to retrieve the
column averaged CO2 dry air mole fraction from these measurements. This
retrieval requires a large number of polarized, multiple-scattering
radiative transfer (RT) calculations for each iteration. These RT
calculations take up the majority of the processing time for each
retrieval, and slow down the algorithm to the point that reprocessing
data from the mission over multiple years becomes very expensive. To
accelerate the RT calculations and thereby ease this bottleneck, we have
developed a novel approach that enables reproduction of the spectra for
the three OCO-2/3 instrument bands from radiances calculated at a small
subset of monochromatic wavelengths. This allows reduction of the number
of monochromatic RT calculations by a factor of 20 and can be achieved
with radiance errors of less than 0.1% with respect to the existing
algorithm. The technique is applicable to similar retrieval algorithms
for other greenhouse gas sensors with large data volumes, such as
GeoCarb, GOSAT-3, and CO2M.