A231-08
Revised and extended benchmark results for Rayleigh scattering of sunlight in spherical atmospheres
Wednesday, 16 December 2020: 06:21
Virtual
Sergey Korkin1, Eun-Su Yang2, Robert J D Spurr3, Claudia Emde4, Nickolay Anatoly Krotkov5, Alexander P Vasilkov6, David P Haffner6, Jungbin Mok7 and Alexei Lyapustin5, (1)Universities Space Research Association Greenbelt, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (2)SSAI, Lanham, MD, United States, (3)Rt Solutions Inc., Cambridge, MA, United States, (4)Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany, (5)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (6)Science Systems and Applications, Inc., Lanham, MD, United States, (7)University of Maryland College Park, Atmospheric and Oceanic Science (AOSC), College Park, MD, United States
Abstract:
We have reproduced and extended results from Adams & Kattawar (A&K) [1] for monochromatic solar light reflected from the top of the Earth’s spherical atmosphere. In contrast to figures frequently published in literature, the numerical results by A&K are suitable for accurate benchmarking of spherical radiative transfer (O-RT) codes. However, A&K limited themselves to the principal plane and did not explicitly discuss the accuracy of their results. The need for accurate O-RT codes, e.g. for remote sensing of the Earth’s atmosphere from a geostationary orbit at dusk and dawn, and for remote sensing of Polar regions, has been growing fast, along with the requirement for comprehensive accurate benchmarks.
Following A&K, we report results for unpolarized light reflected from the top of a Rayleigh scattering atmosphere over a black surface, for two optical thicknesses (0.25 and 1.0), for both single and multiple scattering, in the principal plane and new results out of the principal plane. We use two state-of-the art RT codes: libRadtrans's Mystic (Monte Carlo) and VLIDORT (discrete ordinates). In this talk, we focus on accuracy and some peculiarities of numerical simulations of O-RT, and how to access the new data [2].
References:
[1] Adams, C.N., and Kattawar, G.W., 1978: Radiative transfer in spherical shell atmospheres. I. Rayleigh scattering, Icarus, 35, 139-151.
[2] Korkin, S., Yang E.-S., Spurr, R., Emde C., Krotkov N., Vasilkov A., Haffner D., Mok J., and Lyapustin, A., 2020: Revised and extended benchmark results for Rayleigh scattering of sunlight in spherical atmospheres, JQSRT, 254, 107181.
