MSS products

The measurement space solution (MSS) is a new type of representation of the information retrieved about the vertical profile of an atmospheric constituent. In this new representation the profile is not given, as in classical retrievals, by a sequence of values as a function of altitude, but as the combination of a set of functions each weighted with a measured amplitude. The set of functions are those that belong to the functional space in which the measurement is performed (the so called "measurement space"). The profile obtained in this new way does not directly provide, as classical retrievals do, a useful graphical representation (as seen in Fig. 1.1 and discussed in section 5, some "maquillage" is needed for a graphical representation), but has other important advantages that make it a tool for the full extraction of the information that the observations contain about the profile that is being retrieved.

Fig. 1.1 Comparison between the graphical representations of the MSS and of a classical retrieval of an ozone volume mixing ratio vertical profile. The MSS does not directly provide a useful graphical representation.