A hybrid FDTD/radiative transfer method for modeling remote sensing observations of snow

Trends in large snow and ice masses on the Earth are an indicator of global environmental change. Thus, characterization of emission and scatter behavior of snow and ice continues to be an area of active research for the remote sensing community. Snow and ice tend to be complex media which are difficult to model analytically. Also, purely numerical techniques quickly exhaust available computational resources. The authors propose a hybrid FDTD/radiative transfer technique to overcome the limitations of purely numerical or analytical techniques