Vol. 6, issue 09, article # 4

Abstract:

A radiation treatment of the broken cloud problem is described, based upon a class of stochastic models of the equation of radiative transfer, which considers the clouds and clear sky as a two component random mixture. These models, recently introduced in the kinetic theory literature, allow for both Markovian and non-Markovian statistics as well as spatial variations of the cloudiness. Numerical results are given which compare different models of stochastic radiative transfer, and which point out the importance of treating the broken cloud problem as a stochastic process. It is also shown that an integral Markovian model proposed within the atmospheric radiation community by Titov is equivalent to one of our differential models.