A Remote Sensing and Atmospheric Compensation Tool for Assessing Multispectral Radiative Transfer Properties through Realistic Atmospheres and Clouds

The ability to quickly and accurately model actual atmospheric conditions is essential to remote sensing analyses. Clouds present a particularly complex challenge as they cover up to seventy percent of the earth's surface and their highly variable and diverse nature necessitates physics-based modeling. The Laser Environmental Effects Definition and Reference (LEEDR) is a verified and validated atmospheric propagation and radiative transfer code that creates physically realizable vertical and horizontal profiles of meteorological data. Coupled with numerical weather prediction (NWP) model output, LEEDR enables analysis, nowcasts, and forecasts for radiative effects expected for real-world scenarios. A recent development is the inclusion of the U.S. Air Force’s World Wide Merged Cloud Analysis (WWMCA) cloud data in a new toolset that enables radiance calculations through clouds from UV to RF wavelengths. This effort details the creation of near-real-time profiles of atmospheric and cloud conditions and the resulting radiative transfer analysis for virtually any wavelength(s) of interest. Calendar year 2015 data is analyzed to establish climatological limits for diffuse transmission in the 300-1300 nm band and the impacts of various geometry, cloud microphysical, and atmospheric conditions are examined. 80% of diffuse band transmissions are estimated to fall between 0.248 and 0.889.