A Monte Carlo method for 3D thermal infrared radiative transfer

A 3D Monte Carlo model for specific application to the broadband thermal radiative transfer has been developed in which the emissivities for gases and cloud particles are parameterized by using a single cubic element as the building block in 3D space. For spectral integration in the thermal infrared, the correlated k-distribution method has been used for the sorting of gaseous absorption lines in multiple-scattering atmospheres involving 3D clouds. To check the Monte-Carlo simulation, we compare a variety of 1D broadband atmospheric fluxes and heating rates to those computed from the conventional plane-parallel (PP) model and demonstrate excellent agreement between the two. Comparisons of the Monte Carlo results for broadband thermal cooling rates in 3D clouds to those computed from the delta-diffusion approximation for 3D radiative transfer and the independent pixel-by-pixel approximation are subsequently carried out to understand the relative merits of these approaches.