What is it about?
This is the second exposition of the widely used radiative transfer software package libRadtran. Upgrades to the package since its first exposition in 2005 are described.
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Why is it important?
libRadtran is free, well documented, flexible and powerful, and is used extensively for radiative transfer applied to Earth and the planets.
Perspectives
The main radiative transfer solver used in libRadtran is DISORT, which was originally developed in Fortran by Knut Stamnes and colleagues. The EPIC atmospheric model is written in C, and so to incorporate DISORT into EPIC, I rewrote it in C, as a C programmer would organize it, with dynamic memory allocation and cache-aware memory layouts. The C version has a smaller footprint, runs faster, and is more numerically stable than the original Fortran version; it is now the default radiative transfer solver in libRadtran.
Professor Timothy E. Dowling
University of Louisville
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The libRadtran software package for radiative transfer calculations (version 2.0.1), Geoscientific Model Development, May 2016, Copernicus GmbH,
DOI: 10.5194/gmd-9-1647-2016.
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