Guide

Here you find an overview of how different components of ARTS are intended to work.

There are several sections below that explain in some detail how to understand important data structures and concepts in ARTS. These sections focus on important topics of atmospheric radiative transfer that a user needs to understand to use ARTS successfully, such as how the surface and the atmosphere are defined and represented in ARTS.

The last subsection below is a collection of concepts that are required to understand the background of some of the design decisions in ARTS. It does not cover implementation details, but it is useful to understand how different components of ARTS are intended to work together. These are generic topics that contains theoretical constructs that are often implicitly used in ARTS to allow different methods to work together on the assumption that they all represent a coherent theoretical framework.

The subsections below are given in no particular order.

• The atmosphere
  • The full atmospheric field
  • A single atmospheric point
  • Atmospheric field/point data access
  • Atmospheric field data
• The surface and planet
  • The full surface field
  • A single surface point
  • Surface field/point data access
  • Surface field data
• Sensor description
  • Sensor observation elements
• Underpining concepts and background
  • Absorption
  • Radiative Transfer