Development of a ballistic photon transport model that explicitly resolves cloud microstructure

Deviations from the Beer-Lambert-Bouguer law of exponential attenuation in correlated random media are now well established within the cloud and radiative transfer communities. There is less agreement, however, on determining how to relate the size of the deviation from the exponential law to properties of the spatial statistics of the particulate scatterers/absorbers. In an effort to explore this problem in more detail and develop realistic parameterizations for cloud microphysics, a ballistic-photon model was constructed that explicitly resolves the spatial positions of each individual scatterer/absorber. By implementing different clustering schemes among these scatterers and absorbers, much can be learned about how the deviations from a pure exponential depend on the spatial statistics of the embedded particulates. This research builds on previous work by extending the simulation to semi-realistic cloud volumes using a distributed processing paradigm.