Towards a Generic Radiative Transfer Model for the Earth's Surface Atmosphere System
The ESA-Project ESASLight has been completed on 17 March 2010 after a duration of exactly two years. The aim of the project was to develop a user friendly toolbox for the simulation of current and future Earth observation instruments in the visible and infrared spectral regions. The project has been performed by the DLR Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IPA) in cooperation with the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) of Munich and the DLR Remote Sensing Technology Institute (IMF).
The software package libRadtran (http://www.libradtran.org) was used as basis for the project. It includes various tools for radiative transfer simulations. During the ESASLight project libRadtran has been extended by two important physical processes: polarization and Raman scattering. Furthermore, water and ice clouds, aerosols and surface reflection may now be simulated even more realistically. For high spectral resolution calculations additional line-by-line programs have been provided. The flexibility and user friendliness has been improved by numerous new developments and additions. In particular a prototype of a graphical user interface has been developed. libRadtran is mostly freely available as Open Source. However, the three-dimensional model MYSTIC is licensed only for special applications.
The full documentation of the project is available at the project homepage http://esaslight.libradtran.org/internal/Wiki/doku.php.