A three-dimensional variational method is proposed to simultaneously retrieve the 3-D atmospheric temperature and moisture profiles from satellite radiance measurements. To include both vertical structure and the horizontal patterns of the atmospheric temperature and moisture, an EOF technique is used to decompose the temperature and moisture field in a 3-D space. A number of numerical simulations are conducted and they demonstrate that the 3-D method is less sensitive to the observation errors compared to the 1-D method. When the observation error is more than 2.0 K, to get the best results, the truncation number for the EOF's expansion have to be restricted to 2 in the 1-D method, while it can be set as large as 40 in a 3-D method. This results in the truncation error being reduced and the retrieval accuracy being improved in the 3-D method. Compared to the 1-D method, the rms errors of the 3-D method are reduced by 48% and 36% for the temperature and moisture retrievals, respectively. Using the real satellite measured brightness temperatures at 0557 UTC 31 July 2002, the temperature and moisture profiles are retrieved over a region (20°-45°N, 100°-125°E) and compared with 37 collocated radiosonde observations. The results show that the retrieval accuracy with a 3-D method is significantly higher than those with the 1-D method.
