6533b872fe1ef96bd12d2c95

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Alg: a Toolbox for the Generation of Look-Up tables Based on Atmospheric Radiative Transfer Models

subject

description

Atmospheric radiative transfer models (RTMs) are software tools describing the radiation processes occurring on the Earth’s atmosphere. While the evolution of these tools have achieved better representations of the light-atmosphere interactions, the increase of complexity, interpretability and computation time bears implications towards practical applications in Earth observation. Despite of existing RTM-specific graphical user interfaces, none of these tools allow common streamlining model setup for a wide variety of atmospheric RTMs. In addition, the automatic generation of atmospheric look-up tables (LUTs) can hardly be done with the use of these graphical tools. This paper presents the Atmospheric Look-up table Generator (ALG, v1.2), a new software tool to generate and to analyze LUTs based on a suite of atmospheric RTMs. It facilitates consistent and intuitive user interaction for running model executions and storing RTM data for any spectral configuration in the optical domain. We demonstrate the utility and versatility of ALG to facilitate research on atmospheric radiative transfer, as well as opening the use of atmospheric RTMs to a wide range of applications.