A Markov chain solution to polarized radiative transfer: formalism and application

The Markov chain (MarCh) radiative transfer (RT) approach was first proposed by Esposito and House for efficiently modeling scalar radiative transfer in a plane-parallel atmosphere [1]. In this talk, we will briefly review its principle. Then we will introduce our development for enhancing its modeling accuracy, efficiency and applicability. Our work include developing 1) a polarized MarCh (pMarCh) algorithm to model RT in a coupled atmosphere-ocean and atmosphere-land system to analyze Earth's atmospheric radiation [2]; 2) a pMarCh algorithm to model RT in a spherical-shell atmosphere to analyze Titan's atmospheric radiation [3]; 3) linearizing and integrating the pMarCh algorithm with multi-pixel inversion approach to retrieve aerosol/cloud droplet and lower boundary properties simultaneously [4]-[5]; and 4) a correlated pMarCh algorithm for fast computation of polarized radiation transport in a medium with spatial and/or temporal correlation of aerosol properties such as size distribution, shape, composition and complex refractive index [6].

References

[1]. L. W. Esposito, and L. L. House. Radiative transfer calculated by a Markov chain formalism. Astrophys. J. 219, 1058-1067 (1978).

[2]. F. Xu, A. B. Davis, R. A. West, and L. W. Esposito. Markov chain formalism for polarized light transfer in plane-parallel atmospheres, with numerical comparison to the Monte Carlo method, Opt. Express 19, 946-967 (2011).

[3]. F. Xu, A. B. Davis, R. A. West, J. Martonchik, and D. J. Diner. Markov chain formalism for vector radiative transfer in a plane-parallel atmosphere overlying a polarizing surface, Opt. Lett. 36, 2083-2085, 2011.

[4]. F. Xu, A. B. Davis, S. V. Suniti, J. Martonchik and D. J. Diner. Linearization of Markov chain formalism for vector radiative transfer in a plane-parallel atmosphere/surface system, Appl. Opt. 51, 3491-3507, 2012.

[5]. O. Dubovik, M. Herman, A. Holdak, T. Lapyonok, D. Tanré, J. L. Deuzé, F. Ducos, A. Sinyuk, and A. Lopatin. Statistically optimized inversion algorithm for enhanced retrieval of aerosol properties from spectral multi-angle polarimetric satellite observations, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 4, 975-1018.

[6]. F. Xu, D.J. Diner, O. Dubovik, and Y. Schechner. A correlated multi-pixel inversion approach for aerosol remote sensing. Remote Sens. 2019, 11, 746.