This paper reports the radiative transfer simulations for the passive microwave radiometer onboard the proposed Indian climate research satellite Megha-Tropiques due to be launched in 2011. These simulations have been performed by employing an in-house polarized radiative transfer code for raining systems ranging from depression and tropical cyclones to the Indian monsoon. For the sake of validation and completeness, simulations have also been done for the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM)’s Microwave Imager (TMI) of the highly successful TRMM mission of NASA and JAXA. The paper is essentially divided into two parts: (a) Radiometer response with specific focus on high frequency channels in both the radiometers is discussed in detail with a parametric study of the effect of four hydrometeors (cloud liquid water, cloud ice, precipitating water and precipitating ice) on the brightness temperatures. The results are compared with TMI measurements wherever possible. (b) Development of a neural network-based fast radiative transfer model is elucidated here. The goal is to speed up the computational time involved in the simulation of brightness temperatures, necessitated by the need for quick and online retrieval strategies. The neural network model uses hydrometeor profiles as inputs and simulates spectral microwave brightness temperature at multiple frequencies as output. A huge database is generated by executing the in-house radiative transfer code for seven different cyclones occurred in North Indian Ocean region during the period 2001–2006. A part of the dataset is used to train the network while the remainder is used for testing purposes. For the purpose of testing, a typical scene from the Southwest monsoon rain is also considered. The results obtained are very encouraging and show that the neural network is able to mimic the underlying physics of the radiative transfer simulations with a correlation coefficient of over 99%.

The first step in developing any algorithm to retrieve the atmospheric temperature and humidity parameters at various pressure levels is the simulation of the top of the atmosphere radiances that can be measured by the satellite. This study reports the results of radiative transfer simulations for the multichannel infrared sounder of the proposed Indian satellite INSAT-3D due to be launched shortly. Here, the widely used community software k Compressed Atmospheric Radiative Transfer Algorithm (kCARTA) is employed for performing the radiative transfer simulations. Though well established and benchmarked, kCARTA is a line-by-line solver and hence takes enormous computational time and effort for simulating the multispectral radiances for a given atmospheric scene. This necessitates the development of a much faster and at the same time, equally accurate RT model that can drive a real-time retrieval algorithm. In the present study, a fast radiative transfer model using neural networks is proposed to simulate radiances corresponding to the wavenumbers of INSAT-3D. Realistic atmospheric temperature and humidity profiles have been used for training the network. Spectral response functions of GOES-13, a satellite similar in construction, purpose and design and already in use are used. The fast RT model is able to simulate the radiances for 1200 profiles in 18 ms for a 15-channel GOES profile, with a correlation coefficient of over 99%. Finally, the robustness of the model is tested using additional synthetic profiles generated using empirical orthogonal functions (EOF).