Consolidating the Two-Stream Inversion Package (JRC-TIP) to Retrieve Land Surface Parameters From Albedo Products

The objective of this paper is to present a series of improvements on the Joint Research Centre Two-stream Inversion Package (JRC-TIP) that enhance its effectiveness to generate reliable surface products and associated uncertainties from surface albedo values. Lookup tables (LUTs) are built in the observation space from the JRC-TIP and are used to store solutions obtained from off-line dedicated procedures on selected sets of prior conditions. This new approach drastically limits the occurrence of questionable solutions, revealed by outliers in the retrievals, often associated with local instead of global minima and ensures that the retrieved values are insensitive to small variations in the input albedo values. This TIP table-based approach also reduces considerably the computing time requirement, which is a definite asset in the systematic application of the TIP against large data sets of surface albedo products.