(_measurement_vector)=
# Measurement Vectors
The observation provides what we call the "Core Radiance Format", or colloquially, L1 data.
Often it is desired to not directly use L1 data in the retrieval process, but rather some transformation or subset of the L1 data.
This could be something like a microwindow, high-altitude normalized radiances, wavelength normalized radiances, etc.
We call the result of this transformation the measurement vector, and sometimes even refer to the process of going from L1 data
to the quantities used in the retrieval the measurement vector.

Measurement vectors are passed into the `Retrieval` object as a dictionary of {py:class}`skretrieval.measvec.MeasurementVector`
objects.

## Pre-defined Measurement Vectors
The simplest way to define the measurement vector is to use some of `skretrieval`'s pre-built measurement vectors.

```{eval-rst}
.. autosummary::
    skretrieval.measvec.Triplet
```

## Measurement Vector Filtering
A `MeasurementVector` consists of a function that transforms the L1 data, and a parameter that
is named `apply_to_filter` that defaults to "*".  The filter can be used to restrict the measurement
vector to apply to one certain measurements.  If the L1 data contains multiple `RadianceGridded` objects
such as `{"one": ..., "two": ...}` then if we set `apply_to_filter="one"` the measurement vector
will only apply to the first `RadianceGridded` object.  This can be useful in synergistic applications where
you may want to define multiple measurement vectors for different instruments.

## Manually Defining the Measurement Vector
In some cases you may want to define your own measurement vector, in these cases you can supply your own
user created function that transform the L1 data, however this can be more complicated than it seems.
In addition to transforming the radiances, the transformation must also be applied to the Jacobian matrix, performing standard derivative propagation rules.
The measurement error covariance matrix must also be propagated using Gaussian error propagation rules.
To make this simpler, `skretrieval` provides convenience methods to handle these transformations for you.
They can be composed to create more complicated measurement vector transformations.

See [Measurement Vector API](_api_measurement_vector) for more details.

## Using Context in the Measurement Vector
In some cases, to define the measurement vector we may need to use information internal to the retrieval itself.
For example, we may want to define a measurement vector that only uses measurements with tangent altitudes higher
than the tropopause.

In this caes we can define a set of context variables that will eventually be passed to the measurement vector

```python
from skretrieval.retrieval.processing import Retrieval

@Retrieval.register_context()
def context(cls, *args, **kwargs):
    tropopause_alt = ... # Calculate from any available ancillary information

    return {"tropopause_alt": tropopause_alt}
```

Then we can define our measurement vector using placeholder information that can access this context. For
example,

```python
from skretrieval.retrieval.measvec import Triplet

meas_vec = Triplet(
    wavelength=[470],
    weights=[1],
    altitude_range=["$tropopause_alt - 2000", 40000],
    normalization_range=[40000, 45000]
)
```

defines a triplet measurement vector that takes all measurements from 2 km below the tropopause altitude
and above.