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 cdisort it makes good sense to make the number of moments larger than nstr. For rte_solver fdisort1 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.