Oral Session 5

Operator technique for solving the radiative transfer equation in atmosphere-ocean system

We present a method of numerical solving the radiative transfer equation (RTE) based on the application of recurrent formulas for linear reflection and transmission operators in a plane-parallel atmosphere-ocean system. This approach is implemented in the C++ programming language, advantages of which are the ability to redefine addition and multiplication procedures for operators and the simplicity of programming of the recurrent formulas. The plane-parallel system for which the RTE was solved consists of a Rayleigh atmosphere, an aerosol layer (optical properties of aerosol models are from NASA’s SeaDAS software), the interface between the atmosphere and the ocean, the seawater column and the Lambertian bottom. To validate the developed operator technique we performed calculations of the remote sensing reflectance for the further comparison with the results of field measurements carried out in the Kara Sea in September 2022. The geometry of the observation, the Sun zenith angle, the atmosphere properties and the bio-optical parameters of seawater were set according to the measurement conditions. The comparison with the field data showed a good agreement in spectral range 400-600 nm: the relative error is about 5%, the standard deviation is less than 0.0002 1/sr. Thus, the implemented operator technique allows solving direct problems with the sufficient accuracy, which will subsequently serve as a good foundation for the development of atmospheric correction algorithms.

Mariia Pavlova, Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of Russian Academy of Sciences, Russian Federation, https://orcid.org/0009-0007-5117-0877

Colin A. Stedmon, National Institute of Aquatic Resources, Technical University of Denmark (DTU Aqua), Denmark, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6642-9692

Tobias R. Vonnahme, Greenland Institute of Natural Resources (GINR), Greenland

Efrén López-Blanco, Greenland Institute of Natural Resources (GINR), Greenland

Per Juel Hansen, Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen (KU), Denmark

Thomas Juul-Pedersen, Greenland Institute of Natural Resources (GINR), Greenland

Code of Conduct