The Paper-and-Code Bundle Concept in Atmospheric Radiation Science

Abstract

The modern workforce is under relentless pressure to constantly acquire new skills and knowledge necessary to get the job done. Atmospheric science is not exempt. A typical practitioner must not only understand atmospheric physics (which alone has many branches) and its underlying mathematics (sophisticated), but also details of numerical techniques, and possess basic software engineering skills (for code development). Many classic books and papers in all branches of atmospheric and computer science are available. But that is partially the problem: there are too many. When switching between branches of atmospheric science (due to collaboration or change of projects), nobody has time for deep immersion in relevant literature. Also, successful completion of a project still requires understanding at the level of code developer (because using “black boxes” and “spaghetti codes” is unprofessional, risky, and counterproductive). Many of these theoretical papers are not written from the point of view of turning theory into workable, maintainable code. In this talk we discuss two papers describing numerical simulation of two fundamental physical processes in the atmosphere: multiple scattering of solar light, and absorption by atmospheric trace gases. Following the format of “Numerical Recipes” by Press et al., our papers bundle small pieces of necessary theory with corresponding snippets of code. These are arranged in an order that is natural for code development, which is often opposite of the natural order for laying out the theoretical basis. The first paper has been published in 2022, while the second is a work in progress which we intend to finish in 2024. The goal of both papers is to simplify the transfer of knowledge from seniors to juniors, and exchange skills between experts from different branches of Earth science. The codes are open source to be a learning resource available to all.