The MODTRAN® (MODerate resolution atmospheric TRANsmission) computer code is used worldwide by research scientists in government agencies, commercial organizations, and educational institutions for the prediction and analysis of optical measurements through the atmosphere. MODTRAN was developed and continues to be maintained through a longstanding collaboration between Spectral Sciences, Inc. and the Air Force Research Laboratory. The code is embedded in many operational and research sensor and data processing systems, particularly those involving the removal of atmospheric effects, commonly referred to as atmospheric correction, in remotely sensed multi- and hyperspectral imaging (MSI and HSI).

libRadtran is a library of radiative transfer routines and programs originally designed to calculate spectral irradiance and actinic fluxes in the ultraviolet and visible parts of the spectrum (Kylling, 1992). Over the years, libRadtran has undergone numerous extensions and improvements, now including the full solar and thermal spectrum (currently from 120 nm to 100 μm). Designed as a user-friendly and versatile tool, libRadtran provides a variety of options to setup and modify an atmosphere with molecules, aerosol particles, water and ice clouds, and a surface as lower boundary. One of its unique features is that it includes not only one but a selection of about ten different radiative transfer equation solvers, fully transparent to the user.

The 6S code is a basic RT code used for calculation of lookup tables for the atmospheric correction of satellite and airborne sensors. It enables accurate simulations of observation in the 400-2500 nm spectral range at 2.5 nm spectral resolution, accounting for elevated targets, use of anisotropic and lambertian surfaces and calculation of gaseous absorption. The code is based on the method of successive orders of scatterings approximations and its vector version (6SV) is capable of accounting for radiation polarization.

The ARTDECO (Atmospheric Radiative Transfer Database for Earth Climate Observation) is a numerical tool developed by the Laboratoire d'Optique Atmospherique (LOA) in collaboration with the company HYGEOS and the AERIS/ICARE data and services center of University of Lille (France). This software tool gathers several models and data for the simulation of Earth atmosphere radiances and radiative fluxes as observed with passive sensors (hyperspectral excluded) in the UV to thermal IR range. In ARTDECO, users can either access a library of predefined conditions (atmosphere profile, surface, aerosol and cloud description, filter transmission, etc.) or use their own description. Users can choose among available models (several methods for the truncation of the phase function, several 1D radiative transfer equation solver) to compute radiative quantities corresponding to the scene. This software package is especially powerful to study and optimize performances of different methodologies to model radiative quantities corresponding to a given scene (Compiegne et al., 2013).