A way to specify aerosol optical depth, single scattering albedo,
and phase function moments for each layer. The file specified by
aerosol_files by
aerosol_files file_name
has two columns where column 1 is the altitude in km. The second
column is a the name of a file which defines the optical properties of the layer
starting at the given altitude. The files specified in the second column must have the
following format:
- Column 1:
-
The wavelength in nm. These wavelengths may be different from those in solar_file.
Optical properties are interpolated to the requested wavelengths.
- Column 2:
-
The extinction coefficient of the layer in units km-1.
- Column 3:
-
The aerosol single scattering albedo of the layer.
- Column 4-(nmom+4):
-
The moments of the aerosol phase function.
For some simple examples see the files examples/AERO_*.LAYER. Note that
if using the rte_solver disort2 it makes good sense to make the
number of moments larger than nstr. For rte_solver disort and
rte_solver polradtran the number of moments included in the calculations
will be nstr+1. Higher order moments will be ignored for these solvers.
Please note that the uppermost line of the aerosol_files
denotes simply the top altitude of the uppermost layer. The optical
properties of this line are consequently ignored. There are two
options for this line: either an optical property file with zero
optical thickness is specified or "NULL" us used.
Arve Kylling
2010-03-10