Climatological aerosol profiles with pyrttov

[Andrew Prata]

Hi James

I’m progressing with my work on atcorr and I’m now looking into how best to deal with aerosols in RTTOV. CAMS looks like a good option but as I would like to process data before 2003 (outside the current CAMS reanalysis period), I was thinking of just generating “default” aerosol profiles based on location (latitude) and the OPAC database.

I think the rttov_aer_clim_prof.F90 routine can be used for precisely this purpose, but as I’m currently using pyrttov, I wondered if I can call this routine via the wrapper? I couldn’t find documentation on it in the “rttov-wrapper.pdf” user guide.

If that’s not possible, is there another way you would recommend generating climatological aerosol profiles (based on geographic location) with pyrttov?

Thanks
Andrew

[James Hocking]

Hi Andrew,

The “aer_clim_prof” functionality produces a set of 10 climatological aerosol profile compositions for different scenarios (arctic, desert, maritime, urban, etc) which are formed from various combinations of the OPAC species.

Unfortunately in RTTOV v13 there is no wrapper interface to the rttov_aer_clim_prof subroutine. There is an executable create_aer_clim_prof.exe that you could potentially run from a Python script to generate the ten sets of aerosol profiles for given pressure/temperature/water vapour, and then you can select the set you wish to use. You could modify the code for the exectuable (in src/other/) to make it more useful for your application. The executable is described in Annex N of the RTTOV v13 user guide.

I hope that helps.

Best wishes,
James

[Andrew Prata]

Hi James

Great, thanks. Will give it a go.

Cheers
Andrew

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