Passive remote sensing of planetary atmospheres and retrievals of atmospheric macro- and microphysical parameters

In two recent papers, referred to as Paper 1 and Paper 2 in the main text, we have pursued an idea that atmospheric weighting functions for any geophysical parameters essentially consist of two kinds of entities: weighting functions for the atmospheric radiative parameters, which directly enter the radiative transfer equation, and partial derivatives of the atmospheric radiative parameters with respect to atmospheric geophysical parameters. Corresponding analysis was performed for non-scattering and scattering planetary atmospheres for nadir-viewing geometry and thermal spectral region. In the present paper we conduct a study of the second group of above entities, the partial derivatives of atmospheric radiative parameters with respect to atmospheric geophysical parameters. Along the way, we analyze the role of radiative parameters of individual atmospheric constituents, which serve as intermediaries between the total radiative parameters of the atmosphere and its geophysical parameters. The obtained expressions, combined with radiative weighting functions, are used in the end-to-end expressions for the weighting functions obtained for various specific geophysical parameters.