Streamer: A Radiative Transfer Model
Encyclopedia
Streamer is a radiative transfer
Radiative transfer
Radiative transfer is the physical phenomenon of energy transfer in the form of electromagnetic radiation. The propagation of radiation through a medium is affected by absorption, emission and scattering processes. The equation of radiative transfer describes these interactions mathematically...

 code (Key and Schweiger, 1988) to calculate radiance
Radiance
Radiance and spectral radiance are radiometric measures that describe the amount of radiation such as light or radiant heat that passes through or is emitted from a particular area, and falls within a given solid angle in a specified direction. They are used to characterize both emission from...

s (intensities) or irradiance
Irradiance
Irradiance is the power of electromagnetic radiation per unit area incident on a surface. Radiant emittance or radiant exitance is the power per unit area radiated by a surface. The SI units for all of these quantities are watts per square meter , while the cgs units are ergs per square centimeter...

s in the atmosphere.

The code uses N-stream approximation to the radiative transfer equations (Stamnes et al. 1988) and allows for flexible choice of bands. The code can be used both for satellite radiance applications and estimates of heating rates in both cloudy and non-cloudy atmosphere. One can specify surface reflectivity. Streamer is written in FORTRAN
Fortran
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...

.

FluxNet

FluxNet, the neural network
Neural network
The term neural network was traditionally used to refer to a network or circuit of biological neurons. The modern usage of the term often refers to artificial neural networks, which are composed of artificial neurons or nodes...

 version of Streamer, calculates upwelling and downwelling surface flux in either shortwave or longwave. It is less flexible than Streamer but is two to four times faster.

See also

  • List of atmospheric radiative transfer codes
  • Atmospheric radiative transfer codes
    Atmospheric radiative transfer codes
    An Atmospheric radiative transfer model, code or simulator calculates radiative transfer of electromagnetic radiation through a planetary atmosphere, such as the Earth's.- Methods :...

  • DISORT
    DISORT
    DISORT - general and versatile plane-parallel radiative transfer program applicable to problems from the ultraviolet to the radar regions of the electromagnetic spectrum....


External links

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