Terrestrial Radiation Calcultr

TRC enables students and researchers alike to visualize and quantify a number of terrestrial radiation quantities important for understanding many climate and remote-sensing problems.

The application allows a user to input atmospheric data of their choice to a calibrated radiative transfer model that calculates the spectral radiance field throughout the atmosphere. The user may select specific parameters for manipulation, display, listing and/or saving, including:
• The angular and vertical distributions of Spectral Radiance,
• Spectrally Integrated Radiance vertical and angular distributions,
• Spectrally integrated, vertical distributions of radiant Flux Densities,
• Spectrally integrated, vertical distributions of radiative Cooling Rates,
• Cooling Rate vertical and spectral distribution, and
• Trace Gas Radiative Forcing.

The application uses a band model based radiative transfer code for wavelengths > 3.3 microns at approximately 10 cm-1 resolution fit to HAPI line-by-line calculations. The model includes HITRAN 2016 gaseous absorption properties of H2O, CO2, O3, CH4 and N2O along with accepted absorption and scattering approximations using recent parameterizations of the spectral properties of liquid and ice cloud particles. The MT_CKD 3.5.1 water vapor continuum is used throughout, and line-mixing is included for CO2.

The user may make perturbations to any or all of the input radiative properties on each or neither of two possible input soundings, thereby allowing for “what-if” type simulations. The difference between the quantities calculated from two different input soundings are easily determined, thereby calculating many difference terms, such as trace gas or cloud radiative forcing. The graphics are easily manipulated to zoom in on various portions of the graphs, and both the tabulated and graphical outputs are effortlessly saved to a variety of other applications or storage locations.
Note that the radiation quantities are generally calculated within a second, and there is minimal power consumption for an individual calculation.