A way to specify ice cloud optical depth, single scattering albedo, and phase function moments for each layer.  

ic_files file

 
The file specified by ic_files has two columns where column 1 is the altitude in km. The second column is the name of a file which defines the optical properties of the level 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 single scattering albedo of the layer.

Column 4-(nmom+4):

The moments of the scattering phase function.

Note that if using rte_solver cdisort or rte_solver fdisort2 it makes good sense to make the number of moments larger than nstr because all moments are used in the calculation. 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 ic_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” instead.