A comparison of forward radiative transfer models used in the production of simulated proxy data for the GOES-R ABI

The UW/SSEC Fast Solar/IR Radiative Transfer Model is an implementation of the Successive Orders of Interaction (SOI) method developed at UW-Madison. Our SOI implementation has been to shown to have good accuracy and to be very fast in comparison to other methods – and so it has been the method of choice to date in generating GOES Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) proxy datasets for AWG at UW-Madison. However, the concept of community software models has great appeal in many scientific areas as it brings together the best methods developed by the broader scientific community, wraps them in a consistent Application Programmers Interface (API) and provides a community of users and developers to test, enhance and improve the model. In the field of atmospheric radiative transfer, JCSDA's Community Radiative Transfer Model (CRTM), now at version 2.0.2, is the pre-eminent community model. We present comparisons between simulated radiances from the UW/SSEC SOI-RTM and the CRTM for GOES-R ABI bands for WRF and WRF/Chem model simulations, the latter including aerosol optical properties from a recent compilation of single-scattering properties of tri-axial ellipsoidal mineral dust aerosols. This is part of our on-going commitment to bring to AWG timely and accurate proxy datasets.