Fast, and Accurate Radiative Transfer for Land Surface Models

Land surface models (LSMs) simulate processes occurring at the Earth's surface (including those related to vegetation, soil, and hydrology) and their interactions with the atmosphere. LSMs are crucial for environmental monitoring, weather forecasting, and climate studies. The radiative transfer (RT) through vegetation canopies is an important process that determines photosynthesis, and the land surface energy budget. Conventional multilayer iterative solvers for RT through the canopy are computationally demanding. Here, we develop a multilayer matrix-based RT solver for vegetation canopies. The results show that the solver matches the accuracy of existing models and significantly reduces the computational time for RT, highlighting its potential for practical applications.