What is it about?
Fine particles floating in an atmosphere---dust or ice particles---do not scatter light in all directions, but preferentially in the forward direction. This is most commonly encountered when driving into a sunrise or sunset with a dirty windshield. This article describes a means of accurately modeling this effect for atmospheric work.
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Why is it important?
This article describes a technical improvement to how forward scattering is calculated, leading to a faster and more efficient computer model.
Perspectives
Most weather models are written in Fortran, but the EPIC model is written in C. When it came time to add radiative transfer to the EPIC model, I worked with my colleague Tommy Greathouse to adapt the DISORT radiative transfer code. I ended up manually re-programming the code in C, as a C programmer would organize it, taking advantage of dynamic memory allocation and cache-aware memory layouts. This produced a leaner, faster, and more numerically stable version; these details are included in an appendix to this paper.
Professor Timothy E. Dowling
University of Louisville
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: New secondary-scattering correction in DISORT with increased efficiency for forward scattering, Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, August 2011, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.jqsrt.2011.03.019.
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