scholarly journals Optical properties of canopies of the tropical seagrass Thalassia testudinum estimated by a three-dimensional radiative transfer model

2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 1537-1550 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Hedley ◽  
S. Enríquez
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Stretton ◽  
William Morrison ◽  
Robin Hogan ◽  
Sue Grimmond

<p>The heterogenous structure of cities impacts radiative exchanges (e.g. albedo and heat storage). Numerical weather prediction (NWP) models often characterise the urban structure with an infinite street canyon – but this does not capture the three-dimensional urban form. SPARTACUS-Urban (SU) - a fast, multi-layer radiative transfer model designed for NWP - is evaluated using the explicit Discrete Anisotropic Radiative Transfer (DART) model for shortwave fluxes across several model domains – from a regular array of cubes to real cities .</p><p>SU agrees with DART (errors < 5.5% for all variables) when the SU assumptions of building distribution are fulfilled (e.g. randomly distribution). For real-world areas with pitched roofs, SU underestimates the albedo (< 10%) and shortwave transmission to the surface (< 15%), and overestimates wall-plus-roof absorption (9-27%), with errors increasing with solar zenith angle. SU should be beneficial to weather and climate models, as it allows more realistic urban form (cf. most schemes) without large increases in computational cost.</p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuma Sakai ◽  
Hideki Kobayashi ◽  
Tomomichi Kato

Abstract. Global terrestrial ecosystems control the atmospheric CO2 concentration through gross primary production (GPP) and ecosystem respiration processes. Chlorophyll fluorescence is one of the energy release pathways of excess incident lights in the photosynthetic process. Over the last ten years, extensive studies have been revealed that canopy scale sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF), which potentially provides a direct pathway to link leaf level photosynthesis to global GPP, can be observed from satellites. SIF is used to infer photosynthetic capacity of plant canopy, however, it is not clear how the leaf-level SIF emission contributes to the top of canopy directional SIF. Plant canopy radiative transfer models are the useful tools to understand the causality of directional canopy SIF. One dimensional (1-D) plane parallel layer models (e.g. the Soil Canopy Observation, Photochemistry and Energy fluxes (SCOPE) model) have been widely used and are useful to understand the general mechanisms behind the temporal and seasonal variations in SIF. However, due to the lack of complexity of the actual canopy structures, three dimensional models (3-D) have a potential to delineate the realistic directional canopy SIFs. Forest Light Environmental Simulator for SIF (FLiES-SIF) version 1.0 is the 3-D Monte Carlo plant canopy radiative transfer model to understand the biological and physical mechanisms behind the SIF emission from complex forest canopies. In this model description paper, we focused on the model formulation and simulation schemes, and showed some sensitivity analysis against several major variables such as view angle and leaf area index (LAI). The simulation results show that SIF increases with LAI then saturated at LAI > 2–4 depending on the spectral wavelength. The sensitivity analysis also shows that simulated SIF radiation may decrease with LAI at higher LAI domain (LAI > 5). These phenomena are seen in certain sun and view angle conditions. This type of non-linear and non-monotonic SIF behavior to LAI is also related to spatial forest structure patterns. FLiES-SIF version 1.0 can be used to quantify the canopy SIF in various view angles including the contribution of multiple scattering which is the important component in the near infrared domain. The potential use of the model is to standardize the satellite SIF by correcting the bi-directional effect. This step will contribute to the improvement of the GPP estimation accuracy through SIF.


2019 ◽  
Vol 489 (4) ◽  
pp. 4690-4704 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jong-Ho Shinn

ABSTRACT We have revisited the target EON_10.477_41.954 in order to determine more accurately the uncertainties in the model parameters that are important for target classification (i.e. galaxies with or without substantial extraplanar dust). We performed a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analysis for the 15 parameters of the three-dimensional radiative-transfer galaxy model we used previously for target classification. To investigate the convergence of the MCMC sampling – which is usually neglected in the literature but should not be – we monitored the integrated autocorrelation time (τint), and we achieved effective sample sizes >5650 for all the model parameters. The confidence intervals are unstable at the beginning of the iterations where the values of τint are increasing, but they become stable in later iterations where those values are almost constant. The final confidence intervals are ∼5–100 times larger than the nominal uncertainties used in our previous study (the standard deviation of three best-fitting results). Thus, those nominal uncertainties are not good proxies for the model-parameter uncertainties. Although the position of EON_10.477_41.954 in the target-classification plot (the scale height to diameter ratio of dust versus that of light source) decreases by about 20–30 per cent when compared to our previous study, its membership in the ‘high-group’ – i.e. among galaxies with substantial extraplanar dust – nevertheless remains unchanged.


2007 ◽  
Vol 20 (17) ◽  
pp. 4459-4475 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. J. Stubenrauch ◽  
F. Eddounia ◽  
J. M. Edwards ◽  
A. Macke

Abstract Combined simultaneous satellite observations are used to evaluate the performance of parameterizations of the microphysical and optical properties of cirrus clouds used for radiative flux computations in climate models. Atmospheric and cirrus properties retrieved from Television and Infrared Observation Satellite (TIROS-N) Operational Vertical Sounder (TOVS) observations are given as input to the radiative transfer model developed for the Met Office climate model to simulate radiative fluxes at the top of the atmosphere (TOA). Simulated cirrus shortwave (SW) albedos are then compared to those retrieved from collocated Scanner for Radiation Budget (ScaRaB) observations. For the retrieval, special care has been given to angular direction models. Three parameterizations of cirrus ice crystal optical properties are represented in the Met Office radiative transfer model. These parameterizations are based on different physical approximations and different hypotheses on crystal habit. One parameterization assumes pristine ice crystals and two ice crystal aggregates. By relating the cirrus ice water path (IWP) retrieved from the effective infrared emissivity to the cirrus SW albedo, differences between the parameterizations are amplified. This study shows that pristine crystals seem to be plausible only for cirrus with IWP less than 30 g m−2. For larger IWP, ice crystal aggregates lead to cirrus SW albedos in better agreement with the observations. The data also indicate that climate models should allow the cirrus effective ice crystal diameter (De) to increase with IWP, especially in the range up to 30 g m−2. For cirrus with IWP less than 20 g m−2, this would lead to SW albedos that are about 0.02 higher than the ones of a constant De of 55 μm.


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