Interactive Notebooks

Interactive Notebooks#

This section contains interactive Jupyter notebooks that walk you through pyRadtran’s capabilities — from basic quickstart tutorials to advanced scientific applications.

How to Use These Notebooks#

  • Run locally: Download and run in Jupyter after installing pyRadtran and libRadtran.

  • Copy-paste ready: All code cells are designed to work out of the box once your ~/.pyradtran/config.yaml is set up (see Installation).

  • Real data included: Many examples use actual atmospheric measurements from scientific campaigns.

Notebook Overview#

Quickstart Tutorials#

Start here if you’re new to pyRadtran. These notebooks cover the basic simulation workflow:

  • Surface Albedo — Run your first simulation with varying albedo values

  • Broadband Thermal — Thermal infrared simulations with varying surface temperature

  • Brightness Temperature — Simulating broadband brightness temperatures

  • Solar Spectral — Spectral solar irradiance simulations

  • ERA5 Atmosphere — Using ERA5 reanalysis data for atmospheric profiles

Clouds#

  • Water Clouds — Adding parametric water clouds to simulations

  • Mixed-Phase Clouds — Building mixed-phase cloud profiles from text files

  • Arctic Cloud Experiment — Multi-dimensional cloud parameter sweeps

Radiosondes & Atmosphere#

  • Radiosonde Atmosphere Generator — Creating atmosphere files from IGRA radiosonde data

  • Ny-Ålesund Radiation — Simulating Arctic radiation with radiosonde profiles

  • HALO-(AC)³ Solar Validation — Comparing simulations against aircraft measurements

Advanced Topics#

  • Custom Dimension Iteration — Iterating over dimensions not yet natively supported

  • Shupe & Intrieri Reproduction — Reproducing figures from the literature

  • Multi-Aircraft Thermal Validation — Thermal validation against HALO-(AC)³ broadband radiometers

  • Realistic Clouds (Thermal) — Constructing clouds from lidar/radar observations

  • Realistic Clouds (Solar Spectral) — Same approach for spectral solar simulations

Data Processing & Campaigns#

  • ERA5 Sea Ice Profiles — Downloading and processing ERA5 data for the Arctic

  • ERA5 Region Profiles — Downloading and processing ERA5 data for specific regions

  • Sea Ice ERA5 Plotting — Visualizing processed ERA5 sea ice data

  • Seasonal Sea Ice Profiles — Seasonal ERA5 profiles for sea ice regions

  • CARRA Atmosphere — Working with CARRA reanalysis data

  • Station Nord 2024 — Thermal simulations with radiosonde data from Station Nord

Tip

Always check your input file! See Check Your Input File! for guidance on inspecting the generated libRadtran input files and debugging common issues.

Requirements#

To run these notebooks locally, you’ll need:

pip install pyradtran matplotlib numpy xarray pandas netcdf4

Some notebooks require additional packages (noted at the top of each notebook). Notebooks marked with “Campaign data required” use datasets that are not publicly available — you can adapt the workflow to your own data by replacing the file paths.