Methods
At the core of a radiative transfer model lies the radiative transfer equation that is numerically solved using a solver such as a discrete ordinate method or a Monte Carlo method. The radiative transfer equation is a monochromatic equation to calculate radiance in a single layer of the Earth's atmosphere. To calculate the radiance for a spectral region with a finite width (e.g., to estimate the Earth's energy budget or simulate an instrument response), one has to integrate this over a band of frequencies (or wavelengths). The most exact way to do this is to loop through the frequencies of interest, and for each frequency, calculate the radiance at this frequency. For this, one needs to calculate the contribution of each spectral line for all molecules in the atmospheric layer; this is called a line-by-line calculation. For an instrument response, this is then convolved with the spectral response of the instrument. A faster but more approximate method is a band transmission. Here, the transmission in a region in a band is characterised by a set of pre-calculated coefficients (depending on temperature and other parameters). In addition, models may consider scattering from molecules or particles, as well as polarisation; however, not all models do so.
Read more about this topic: Atmospheric Radiative Transfer Codes
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