A mathematical study on effective wavenumber, an operative computation procedure, and its use with radiance-temperature relationships

In this paper we study the existence of effective wavenumber for any sensor by means of simple mathematics. We implement a numeric algorithm, based on the developed mathematical background, into a computer program named 'srf2radi', which is freely available via anonymous File Transfer Protocol (FTP) at ftp://ftp.uv.es/pub/src/. The number of effective wavenumbers for each temperature and their accuracy are also computed and studied for NOAA-16 Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer Version 3 (AVHRR/3) channel 4. These effective wavenumbers can be used to obtain radiance-temperature relationships with physical meaning for any sensor in user-defined temperature intervals.