Monte Carlo Radiative Transfer for Limb Scattered Sunlight Measurements

The SASKTRAN radiative transfer model is a spherical, successive orders, discrete ordinates model used for operational processing of the OSIRIS limb scattered sunlight measurements for retrievals of ozone, nitrogen dioxide and stratospheric aerosol extinction. Here we present results from the development of a Monte Carlo version of this model that provides the ability to test the robustness of the assumptions inherent in the operational version of the SASKTRAN model and investigate three dimensional effects, including the 3D averaging kernels for the retrievals.