Information content of the radiative transfer theory

The new generation of instruments to measure the atmosphere gives a large amount of information whose content is not immediately obvious. For this reason the information content (in the Shannon sense) and the number of degrees of freedom for signal related to parameters to retrieve, are crucial to carry out, for instance, the selection of microwindows or subset of channels for retrieval. This seems to be even true for the miniaturized devices like those obtained by MEOMS technologies that have high flexibility because are highly integrated. In this paper we present the methodologies to obtain the information content related to wavelengths selection from satellite with limb and nadir view with in mind the MEOMS technology.