Allez-vous à Montréal?

Abstracts were due today for the Joint Assembly in Montreal in May. I decided to submit one because the timing should be just about right for me wrapping up my PhD research, so it should be the perfect opportunity to present my work in front of an audience of experts who may happen to want to hire me ;) So, without further delay, I present to you the title and abstract of my proposed presentation, submitted to the session entitled, "Challenges for three-dimensional radiative transfer in the Earth and atmospheric sciences". Allez-vous à Montréal?

"Radiative Transfer in a Cloudy Atmosphere Using a New Spectrally Integrating 3D Monte Carlo Model"

A process level understanding of the interactions between clouds, aerosols, and radiation is integral to understanding our changing climate. Some work has already been done to show the importance of 3D effects in redistributing radiative heating in the atmosphere and biasing satellite retrieval algorithms. However, there is much more still to be done.

The Intercomparison of 3D Radiation Codes Community Monte Carlo model (I3RC) has been extended from its original monochromatic solar source form to include monochromatic thermal emission and broadband integration. This model’s unique feature is a Monte Carlo approach to spectral integration, randomly sampling frequencies from a probability distribution determined by either the solar source function, or the thermal emission function unique to the emitting properties of the prescribed surface and atmosphere. This provides a statistically exact solution with unbiased random error whose magnitude is dependent on the number of contributing samples. Additional features include convolution with an instrument spectral response function, tools to interface with the HITRAN database, flexible object oriented open source code base, and extension to massively parallel computing resources such as Blue Waters. Accuracy benchmarks have been performed against cases from the Continual Intercomparison of Radiation Codes.

Such a highly accurate and flexible model has the capability to provide to the community high spatial resolution radiative quantities such as volumetric heating rates, boundary fluxes, and top of atmosphere radiances that can act as standards of comparison for the less accurate but less expensive radiative transfer models more commonly employed both in other process studies and as parameterizations in dynamic models of the atmosphere.