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arXiv · 1804.04961

Analytical Models of Exoplanetary Atmospheres. VI. Full Solutions for Improved Two-stream Radiative Transfer Including Direct Stellar Beam

Kevin Heng·Matej Malik·Daniel Kitzmann
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Abstract

Two-stream radiative transfer is a workhorse in the Earth, planetary and exoplanetary sciences due to its simplicity and ease of implementation. However, a longstanding limitation of the two-stream approximation is its inaccuracy in the presence of medium-sized or large aerosols. This limitation was lifted by the discovery of the improved two-stream technique, where the accuracy of the scattering greenhouse effect is matched to that of multi-stream calculations by construction. In the present study, we derive the full solutions for improved two-stream radiative transfer, following its introduction by Heng & Kitzmann (2017), and include contributions from the direct stellar beam. The generalization of the original two-stream flux solutions comes in the form of a correction factor, traditionally set to unity, which is the ratio of a pair of first Eddington coefficients. We derive an analytical expression for this correction factor and also provide a simple fitting function for its ease of use by other workers. We prove that the direct stellar beam is associated with a second Eddington coefficient that is on the order of unity. Setting this second Eddington coefficient to 2/3 and $1/\sqrt{3}$ reproduces the Eddington and quadrature closures, respectively, associated with the direct beam. We use our improved two-stream solutions for the fluxes to derive two-stream source function solutions for both the intensity and fluxes.

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Kevin Heng, Matej Malik, Daniel Kitzmann. 2018-07-03. Analytical Models of Exoplanetary Atmospheres. VI. Full Solutions for Improved Two-stream Radiative Transfer Including Direct Stellar Beam. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4365%2Faad199

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