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Professor K. N. Liou bigblack Academic Courses


             radtransfer1


Atmos C244:  Radiative Transfer


             


C244. Methods of Radiative Transfer. (4) Lecture, three hours; laboratory, one hour.
Requisites: courses C203C/C165 or instructor's consent


Introduction to the principles of absorption and emission of greenhouse gases; Discussion of thermal infrared spectrum of the Earth's atmosphere; Theory of infrared radiative transfer; Line-by-line, correlated k-distribution method, and traditional band model approaches for infrared radiative transfer; Application to inhomogeneous atmospheres; Introduction to the discrete-ordinates and adding methods for radiative transfer; two-stream and four-stream approximations for radiative transfer; Introduction to contemporary subjects in radiative transfer, including polarization and multi-dimensional space; Presentation of a user-friendly computer code for radiative transfer for applications to remote sensing and climate research. (Offered every other year).

Textbook: An Introduction to Atmospheric Radiation, Academic Press, 2002, Chapters 4 and 6; additional references will also be provided.

Letter grades: students are required to carry out a numerical exercise using a radiative transfer computer code for flux calculations in clear and cloudy atmospheres and to solve a number of challenging problems in atmospheric radiative transfer.

Outline of the course

  • INTRODUCTION: the thermal infrared spectrum and the greenhouse effect
  • ABSORPTION AND EMISSION IN THE ATMOSPHERE: absorption due to H2O, CO2, O3, CH4, N2O, and CFC; fundamentals of infrared radiative transfer; line-by-line integration
  • CORRELATED K-DISTRIBUTION METHOD FOR RADIATIVE TRANSFER: fundamentals; application to nonhomogeneous atmospheres; a numerical procedure for sorting absorption lines; line overlap consideration
  • INTRODUCTION TO ADDING METHOD FOR RADIATIVE TRANSFER:definitions of physical parameters; single-scattering approximation; adding equations
  • INTRODUCTION TO DISCRETE-ORDINATES METHOD FOR RADIATIVE TRANSDER: basic equations; two-stream and four-stream approximations
  • INTRODUCTION TO FU-LIOU'S RADIATIVE TRANSFER COMPUTER CODE