Radiative transfer through arbitrarily shaped optical media. Part II: group theory and simple closures

Abstract

Notions of scale hierarchy and closure are introduced into the radiative transfer equation, and it is demonstrated how the customary treatment of partial cloudiness based on cloud amount as a weighting parameter is a special form of closure. Another simple example of closure is described which allows for the treatment of spatial inhomogeneities as a new form of optical property. This concept is introduced into a two-stream model to demonstrate, in a gross way, the effects of inhomogeneities on radiative transfer. -from Author