All Altitude Atmospheric RT Algorithm for Scene Generation

Radiation-transport (RT) codes constitute the core component of the many target, plume, background, and atmospheric signature models utilized not only by the Missile Defense Agency but also by virtually every other government agency and commercial company involved in developing optically-based weapons, surveillance, and remote-sensing systems. To handle high volume generation of scenes required by many of today's DOD programs, the atmospheric RT algorithm must be optimized for both speed and accuracy, for both low (LTE) and high altitude (NLTE) regimes, and must be a callable module for programs such as BEST and FLITES. A high-fidelity and efficient all-altitude atmospheric RT algorithm to support scene rendering does not presently exist. Spectral Sciences, Inc. propose to formulate in Phase I a fast radiative transport approach, based on the correlated-K (cK) method that will be optimized to accurately treat both low and high altitude atmospheric conditions, efficiently predicting not only radiance, but also radiance statistics parameters that can used to create images of stochastic atmospheric structures. The new algorithm will be designed to take the best advantage of the dynamical memory allocation, and of parallelization possible with modern compilers, which will enhance memory management and computational efficiency.