  We demonstrate that the global fields of temperature, humidity and
geopotential heights admit a nearly sparse representation in the wavelet
domain, offering a viable path forward to explore new paradigms of
sparsity-promoting data assimilation and compressive recovery of land
surface-atmospheric states from space. We illustrate this idea using retrieval
products of the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) and Advanced Microwave
Sounding Unit (AMSU) on board the Aqua satellite. The results reveal that the
sparsity of the fields of temperature is relatively pressure-independent while
atmospheric humidity and geopotential heights are typically sparser at lower
and higher pressure levels, respectively. We provide evidence that these
land-atmospheric states can be accurately estimated using a small set of
measurements by taking advantage of their sparsity prior.
