Determination of the temperature profile in an atmosphere from its outgoing radiation

A highly convergent relaxation method for the inversion of the full radiative transfer equation was developed. The results of the iterative solution indicate that convergence can be achieved over a wide range of initial guesses, enabling the temperature profile of a relatively unknown atmosphere to be unambiguously determined. The method is illustrated by examples for the outgoing radiance in the earth's atmosphere for the region of the 4.3 microns CO2 band, but can be similarly applied in other frequency ranges.