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, including the widely-used DISORT code by Stamnes et al. (1988) and its C-code version (Buras et al.,2011), a fast two-stream code (Kylling et al., 1995), a polarization-dependent code polRadtran (Evans and Stephens, 1991), and the fully three-dimensional Monte Carlo code for the physically correct tracing of photons in cloudy atmospheres, MYSTIC (Mayer, 2009; Emde and Mayer, 2007; Emde et al., 2010; Buras and Mayer, 2011; Emde et al., 2011). MYSTIC optionally allows to consider polarization and fully spherical geometry. Please note that the public release includes only a 1D version of MYSTIC.
Our Atmospheric LUT Generator (ALG) toolbox supports usage of libRadtran v2.0.4.
Contact:
Contact here.
References:
- Emde, R. Buras-Schnell, A. Kylling, B. Mayer, J. Gasteiger, U. Hamann, J. Kylling, B. Richter, C. Pause, T. Dowling, and L. Bugliaro. The libradtran software package for radiative transfer calculations (version 2.0.1). Geoscientific Model Development, 9(5):1647-1672, 2016.
- Mayer and A. Kylling. Technical note: The libRadtran software package for radiative transfer calculations - description and examples of use. Atmos. Chem. Phys., 5: 1855-1877, 2005.