ITR/AP: Inversion of Multidimensional Remotely Sensed Data to Obtain Evaporation and Other Meteorologic Parameters

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This is an award supported jointly by the Information Technology Research program in Geosciences and the Physical Meteorology program. The objective is to use archival data from the Los Alamos Scanning Raman Lidar on the spatial distribution of water vapor to develop a remote-sensing-based method for determining the evaporation rate as a function of position on the ground. More generally, the procedure may be extended to estimate the surface distribution of emission rates for any measurable conservative passive additive. It is an inverse problem in geophysical data analysis, because the distribution of the surface evaporation rate is determined from the measured three- dimensional pattern of vapor concentration and its variation with time. The project is planned in two phases. First the forward problem will be analyzed, in which various distributions of upwind emission rates will be assumed and the resulting vertical distributions of concentration calculated, for different combinations of stability and wind speed. Next, the solution of the forward problem will be used to develop a mathematical inversion technique, whereby the spatial distribution of emission sources and their strengths will be determined from the lidar-observed 3D pattern. The research holds the promise of discovering new ways to use remotely-sensed data for atmospheric observation, analysis, and modeling.