Preprocessing of the Direct-broadcast Data from the Atmospheric Infared Sounder (AIRS) Sounding Suite on Aqua Satellite

We present a pre processing system for the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) sounding suite onboard Aqua satellite. With its unprecedented 2378 channels in IR bands, AIRS aims at achieving the sounding accuracy [s1]of a radiosonde (1 K in 1-km layer for temperature and 10% in 2-km layer for humidity). The core of the pre p rocessor is the International MODIS/AIRS Processing Package (IMAPP) that performs the geometric and radiometric correction to compute the Earth's radiance. Then we remove spurious data and retrieve the brightness temperature (Tb). Since we process the direct-broadcast data almost for the first time among the AIRS directbroadcast community, special attention is needed to understand and verify the products. This includes the pixel-to-pixel verification of the direct-broadcast product with reference to the fullorbit product, which shows the difference of less than $10^{-3}$ K in IR Tb.