In addition, Chapter 8 references Oreopoulos et al. (2012) for its description of an international intercomparison
of radiative transfer codes that was co-led by an AER scientist.
These areas included construction of novel data sets for algorithm development (both in situ and synthetic data sets), cross comparison and benchmarking of coupled ocean -
atmosphere radiative transfer codes, and cross comparison of instruments in the field to assess and constrain uncertainties in the measurements of oceanic particle absorption.
We report the results of simulations using a coupled ocean - atmosphere
vector radiative transfer code (NASA GISS) to obtain the polarized reflectance for various water compositions typical for coastal zones, as function of wavelength and sun / sensor geometry.
Another radiation code intercomparison, Forster et al. (2011), is also referenced in this chapter for its investigation of the performance of
various radiative transfer codes.
Synthetic solar spectra are calculated with a state - of - the -
art radiative transfer code (Haberreiter et al. 2008; Shapiro et al. 2010).
But be careful, once I told you that the MODTRAN or even other LBL codes are not good enough, you should write your
own radiative transfer code which riogorously obey first principles (like monochromatic Beer - Lambert law)....
And it is certainly something that should be done, rather than continuing to cite the 3.7 W / m2 value that was determined ca 2000 and does not use the
latest radiative transfer codes that have been improved and validated.
Although Collins et al. does point out that many of the climate
models radiative transfer codes do not compare well with the line by line models for CO2 doubling.
However, in a static caclulation to calculate radiative forcing, you can specify the clouds based on climatology, then run
the radiative transfer code for current CO2 and doubled CO2.
AER's
radiative transfer codes are relied on throughout the atmospheric community, and Iacono et al. (2008) is cited for demonstrating their accuracy.
Radiative transfer codes that accurately calculate the radiative impact of greenhouse gases and other atmospheric constituents are an essential component of the global climate models used to simulate present and future climate.
Column radiative forcing calculations by fifteen
radiative transfer codes of varying complexity (Boucher et al., 1998) show that, for well constrained input data, differences in the computed radiative forcing when clouds are excluded are relatively modest at approximately 20 % (see Figure 6.3).