AbstractsEarth & Environmental Science

On Modeling Elastic and Inelastic Polarized Radiation Transport in the Earth Atmosphere with Monte Carlo Methods

by Tim Deutschmann




Institution: Universität Leipzig
Department: Physik und Geowissenschaften
Degree: PhD
Year: 2015
Record ID: 1100505
Full text PDF: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa-161475


Abstract

The three dimensional Monte Carlo radiation transport model McArtim is extended to account for the simulation of the propagation of polarized radiation and the inelastic rotational Raman scattering which is the cause of the so called Ring effect. From the achieved and now sufficient precision of the calculated Ring effect new opportunities in optical absorption spectroscopy arise. In the calculation the method of importance sampling (IS) is applied. Thereby one obtains from an ensemble of Monte Carlo photon trajectories an intensity accounting for the elastic aerosol particle-, Cabannes- and the inelastic rotational Raman scattering (RRS) and simultaneously an intensity, for which Rayleigh scattering is treated as an elastic scattering process. By combining both intensities one obtains the so called filling-in (FI, which quantifies the filling-in of Fraunhofer lines) as a measure for the strength of the Ring effect with the same relative precision as the intensities. The validation of the polarized radiometric quantities and the Ring effect is made by comparison with partially published results of other radiation transport models. Furthermore the concept of discretisation of the optical domain into grid cells is extended by making grid cells arbitrarily joining into so called clusters, i.e. grid cell aggregates. Therewith the program is able to calculate derivatives of radiometrically or spectroscopically accessible quantities, namely the intensities at certain locations in the atmospheric radiation field and the light path integrals of trace gas concentrations associated thereto, i.e. the product of the DOAS (differential optical absorption spectroscopy) method, with respect to optical properties of aerosols and gases in connected spatial regions. The first and second order derivatives are validated through so called self-consistency tests. These derivatives allow the inversion of three dimensional tracegas and aerosol concentration profiles and pave the way down to 3D optical scattered light tomography. If such tomographic inversion scheme is based solely on spectral intensitites the available second order derivatives allows the consideration of the curvature in the cost function and therefore allows implementation of efficient optimisation algorithms. The influence of the instrument function on the spectra is analysed in order to mathematically assess the potential of DOAS to a sufficient degree. It turns out that the detailed knowledge of the instrument function is required for an advanced spectral analysis. Concludingly the mathematical separability of narrow band signatures of absorption and the Ring effect from the relatively broad band influence of the elastic scattering processes on the spectra is demonstrated which corresponds exactly to the DOAS principle. In that procedure the differential signal is obtained by approximately 4 orders of magnitude faster then by the separate modelling with and without narrow band structures. Thereby the fusion of the separated steps DOAS spectral…