MEAN PROPAGATION KERNELS FOR TRANSPORT IN CORRELATED STOCHASTIC MEDIA AT UNRESOLVED SCALES, ILLUSTRATION WITH A PROBLEM IN ATMOSPHERIC RADIATION

摘要

A simple and effective framework is presented for modeling transport processes unfolding at computationally and/or observationally unresolved scales in scattering, absorbing and emitting media. The new approach acts directly on the spatial (i.e., propagation) part of the kernel in the integral formulation of the generic linear transport equation framed for stochastic media with a wide variety of spatial correlations, going far beyond the Markov-Poisson class used in the classic Pomraning-Levermore model. This statistical look at the extinction of un-coHided particle beams takes us away from the standard exponential law of transmission. New transmission laws arise that are generally not exponential, often not even for asymptotically large jumps. This means that, from this perspective on random spatial variability, there is no "effective medium" per se nor homogenization technique that can be used to describe the effects of unresolved fluctuations of the collision coefficient. However, one can still rewrite the transport equation, at least in its integral form, in a manner that looks like its counterpart for uniform media, but with a modified propagation kernel. Implementation in a Monte Carlo scheme is trivially simple and numerical results are presented that illustrate the bulk effect of the new parameterization for plane-parallel geometry. We survey time-domain diagnostics of solar radiative transfer in the Earth's cloudy atmosphere obtained recently from high-resolution ground-based spectroscopy, and it is shown that they are explained comprehensively by the new model. Finally, we discuss possible applications of this modeling framework in nuclear engineering.