Additional tools

ALG comes together with various tools that aim at facilitating users to interact with the implemented atmospheric RTMs and the produced look-up tables. These tools offer higher versatility for designing LUTs for specific applications such as aerosol studies, field campaign data processing or sensitivity analysis. In this section, we will describe these additional tools and how to use them to generate and use atmospheric data. If you would like to implement your own tool in ALG, please don't hesitate to contact us.

Aerosol Toolkit (ATK)

Suspended particles (aerosols) play an important role in air quality, human health and Earth's radiative balance. They are one of the main contributors of light scattering in the atmosphere radiative transfer, modifying the local and planetary albedo and absorbing the upward terrestrial thermal radiation. Understanding the radiometric effect of aerosol optical properties from measured at-sensor radiance is therefore necessary to properly characterize them and to include their radiative effects in Earth's energy budget. From a remote sensing perspective, characterizing aerosols improve the quality of atmospheric correction and further data processing.

The aerosol toolkit (ATK) permits defining new aerosol models for the implemented atmospheric RTM beyond the default models. In this section we will demonstrate how users can define their own aerosol models based on different options, which include: (1) aerosol optical properties, (2) particle size/volume distribution and (3) interface with OPAC aerosol database.

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Atmospheric Generator Toolkit (AGT)

The Atmospheric Generator Toolkit (AGT) allows users to define new atmospheric profiles (i.e., vertical distribution of atmospheric pressure, temperature and gas concentrations) beyond the predefined atmospheric models. With AGT, users can define their own custom atmospheric models profiles or interface with existing radiosonde datasets and global meteorological reanalysis data from ECMWF and NCEP.

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