RTTOV v14

RTTOV v14

RTTOV v14.0 was released in February 2025. The package may be obtained by adding RTTOV to your list of software preferences once you have registered and logged in.

Coefficients, emissivity and BRDF atlas data files are available separately on the RTTOV downloads page.

Frequently asked questions are asked and answered here.

Please look at the list of known bugs as the official release package does not contain any updates or fixes listed there.

A Docker container is available which may help when installing/running the RTTOV-GUI. Full instructions included in the README.md file.

Requirements for RTTOV v14

  • Computer running Linux/Unix
  • Fortran2008 compiler (e.g. gfortran)
  • gzip, bzip2 and xz compression utilities
  • GNU make utility
  • About 1GB of free disk space required for full install (including bundled coefficients and test and reference data). Additional space is required for larger coefficient files and emissivity/BRDF atlas data that are not included with the RTTOV package.
  • RTTOV can be compiled and run without any external dependencies, but some features require external libraries or software.
  • It is recommended to compile RTTOV against the netCDF4 library (v4.1 or later) which enables reading of netCDF-format coefficients, and emissivity/BRDF atlases.
  • To use the RTTOV Python wrapper (and therefore also the RTTOV GUI which uses the wrapper) you must have f2py (part of NumPy) installed. The wrapper and GUI are compatible with Python3. Python2 is not supported.

Installing RTTOV v14.0

To compile RTTOV v14.0, create a new directory for the package. For example:

$ mkdir ~user/rttov14
$ cd ~user/rttov14

Copy the compressed RTTOV package file (rttov140.tar.xz) into this new top-level directory and extract the contents, for example:

$ tar xf rttov140.tar.xz

RTTOV can be compiled without any external dependencies. However to make use of all functionality you should edit the file build/Makefile.local with the location of your netCDF4 installation (and possibly also the location of the HDF5 library on which your netCDF library is built) before compiling.

RTTOV v14.0 can be compiled using an interactive script (this is recommended):

$ cd src
$ ../build/rttov_compile.sh

Alternatively you can compile manually as for earlier versions: see the user guide for details.

RTTOV v14 code updates and known issues can be found here.