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).
The scientific numeric core of ARTDECO is written in Fortran90. The configuration files and the main driver are written in python and libraries are in ASCII format, leading to a very high flexibility and portability.
Users can either access a library for the scene definition (atmosphere profile, k-distribution coefficients for gas absorption, surface, aerosol and cloud description, filter transmission, etc) or use their own description through ASCII input files. Then, they can choose among available models to compute radiative quantities. Technical parameters for these models are also accessible through ASCII files. ARTDECO can also be used only to compute new particle optical properties.
It is developed and maintained at the Laboratoire d’Optique Atmosphérique and the AERIS/ICARE Data and Services Center. The development is funded by the TOSCA program of the French space agency (CNES). The software is freely-available after registration in the ICARE service and acceptance of the ARTDECO data policy.