The penetration of diffuse ultraviolet radiation into interstellar clouds
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view Abstract Citations (104) References (10) Co-Reads Similar Papers Volume Content Graphics Metrics Export Citation NASA/ADS The penetration of diffuse ultraviolet radiation into interstellar clouds Flannery, B. P. ; Roberge, W. ; Rybicki, G. B. Abstract It is shown that the solution of the transfer equation appropriate for models of the penetration of diffuse UV radiation into interstellar clouds, subject to attenuation by coherent, nonconservative, anisotropic scattering from grains, can be expressed analytically, with arbitrary accuracy, by means of the spherical harmonics method. Models of plane-parallel and homogeneous spherical clouds are given as functions of three parameters: the central optical depth, the single scattering albedo, and the parameter in the Henyey-Greenstein phase function. These models qualitatively confirm the results of earlier Monte Carlo simulations of dust scattering, but reveal quantitative discrepancies: the earlier results overestimated the actual mean intensity, often by more than an order of magnitude. Publication: The Astrophysical Journal Pub Date: March 1980 DOI: 10.1086/157778 Bibcode: 1980ApJ...236..598F Keywords: Clouds; Diffuse Radiation; Interstellar Matter; Radiative Transfer; Spherical Harmonics; Ultraviolet Radiation; Asymptotic Methods; Legendre Functions; Monte Carlo Method; Transfer Functions; Astrophysics full text sources ADS |Abstract In the Earth Sciences, the 3D radiative transfer equation is often solved for by Monte Carlo (MC) methods. They can, however, be computationally taxing, and that can narrow their range of application and limit their use in explorations of model parameter spaces. A novel family of MC algorithms is investigated here in which single simulations provide estimates of both radiative quantities A for a set of parameters , as usual, as well as the overarching functional ( x ) that can be evaluated, extremely efficiently, at any x . One such algorithm is developed and demonstrated for horizontally averaged broadband solar radiative fluxes as functions of surface albedo for uniform Lambertian surfaces beneath inhomogeneous cloudy atmospheres. Simulations for a high‐resolution synthetic cloud field, at various solar zenith angles, illustrate the potential of the method to gain insights into the nature of 3D radiative effects for complicated atmosphere‐surface conditions using information specially derived from the MC simulation. For simulations performed with a single surface albedo it is found that as surface albedo increases, 3D radiative effects increase, too, with maxima occurring at middling to large values, and then decrease. By utilizing the derived coefficients that describe it was established that these 3D effects stem from differences in fractions of radiation entrapped at successive orders of internal multiple reflections for 1D and 3D transfer.
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Abstract Approximate methods for radiative transfer equations that are fast, reliable, and accurate are essential for the understanding of atmospheres of exoplanets and brown dwarfs. The simplest and most popular choice is the “two-stream method,” which is often used to produce simple yet effective models for radiative transfer in scattering and absorbing media. Toon et al. (hereafter, Toon89) outlined a two-stream method for computing reflected light and thermal spectra that was later implemented in the open-source radiative transfer model PICASO . In Part I of this series, we developed an analytical spherical harmonics method for solving the radiative transfer equation for reflected solar radiation that was implemented in PICASO to increase the accuracy of the code by offering a higher-order approximation. This work is an extension of this spherical harmonics derivation, to study thermal emission spectroscopy. We highlight the model differences in the approach for thermal emission and benchmark the four-term method (SH4) against Toon89 and a high-stream discrete-ordinates method, CDISORT . By comparing the spectra produced by each model, we demonstrate that the SH4 method provides a significant increase in accuracy, compared to Toon89, which can be attributed to the increased order of approximation and to the choice of phase function. We also explore the trade-off between computational time and model accuracy. We find that our four-term method is twice as slow as our two-term method, but is up to five times more accurate, when compared with CDISORT . Therefore, SH4 provides excellent improvement in model accuracy with minimal sacrifice in numerical expense.
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