Środowiskowe Seminarium Fizyki Atmosfery

In this high-level survey of my work in atmospheric radiation at GSCF, LANL, and JPL, I will show that fractals show up in interesting places. Some are for modeling the geometry of cloud shapes or the internal structure of real-world stratus clouds, which are in fact rather plane-parallel. They also show up at the core of the radiation transport physics unfolding in clouds, whether modeled in 1D or in 3D, whether the source is the sun or a pulsed laser. The later type of fractal is not a geometric construct in the usual sense of the word, but rather a mental visualization of how multiply scattered light propagates randomly in the cloudy medium. Finally, I’ll mention some on-going work where the two types of fractal work together to produce a model that has helped us analyze oxygen A-band observations of the cloudy atmosphere, which are about to become far more abundant.