Fast Radiative Transfer Models

by Leanne Avila — last modified Oct 21, 2014 07:21 AM

Guidance for fast radiative transfer model developments

Guidance on developing and testing tangent linear and adjoint code The lecture materials below are courtesy of Tom Kleespies.

Optical Property Databases for Clouds (non-spherical implied)
- Bryan Baum's data. Ice clouds; Infrared only; specific instruments; a subset of Ping Yang's data.
- Guosheng Liu's data. Microwave only.
- Ping Yang's data. Infrared only. Delivered to JCSDA and available on request from Fuzhong Weng
- A dataset of optical properties for ice particles is available on request from Anthony Baran. The dataset contains optical properties for ice particles (absorption and scattering coefficients, ssa, assymetry parameter and phase function) at 72 wavelengths between 3 and 18 microns for 20662 different values of temperature and ice water content.
- A dataset of optical properties for hexagonal column ice particles is available on request from Marco Matricardi. The optical properties have been computed using T-matrix and geometrical optics computations for 32 different particle size distributions.

Optical Property Databases for Aerosols
- Ping Yang's data. Infrared only. Delivered to JCSDA and available on request from Fuzhong Weng
- The OPAC database of optical properties of aerosols is available from the GEISA we site.
- Recent refractive indices and size distributions for volcanic ash (Millington et al. 2012) and Asian dust ( Han et al. 2012) aerosol particles are available on request from James Hocking. Details can be found in the RTTOV science and validation report.

Follow model-name links to access full summaries of model features and development status provided by the model developers and updated after each ITSC by the RTSP working group.

Model	Supported sensors	Contact	Website
RTTOV	Multi-sensor *	Roger Saunders (UKMO)	Eumetsat NWP SAF website
CRTM	Multi-sensor *	Paul van Delst (NESDIS)	Paul van Delst's web documentation
MSCFAST	HIRS,GOES,AIRS	Louis Garand (MSC)	more details
OSS	AIRS	Jean-Luc Moncet (AER)
SARTA	AIRS	Scott Hannon (UMBC)	SARTA website
PFAAST		Hal Woolf (CIMSS)
Gastropod	AIRS	Vanessa Sherlock (NIWA)	Gastropod website
PCRTM	AIRS,IASI,NAST-I	Xu Liu (NASA)
RTIASI	IASI	Marco Matricardi (ECMWF)
LMD fast models		Alain Chedin/Noelle Scott (LMD)
Zeeman model	SSMIS	Yong Han (NESDIS)

* see full summary for list of supported sensors

Software for interpolating profiles and mapping of Jacobians from the fast RT layering to NWP vertical coordinates (TL/AD/Gradient) is now part of RTTOV-9. A stand-alone version of the software is available at:

Profile_Utility webpage containing Fortran95 code and documentation to perform units conversions and level-to-layer conversions on atmospheric quantities (Forward models only).