The Spherical Harmonic Discrete Ordinate Method (SHDOM) radiative transfer model computes polarized monochromatic or spectral band radiative transfer in a one, two, or three-dimensional medium for either collimated solar and/or thermal emission sources of radiation. The model is written in a variant of Fortran 77 and in Fortran90 and requires a Fortran 90 compiler. Also included are programs for generating the optical property files input to SHDOM from physical properties of water cloud particles and aerosols.

PolRadTran is a plane-parallel polarized radiative transfer model. It is used to compute the radiance exiting a vertically inhomogeneous atmosphere containing randomly-oriented particles. Both solar and thermal sources of radiation are considered. A direct method of incorporating the polarized scattering information is combined with the doubling and adding method to produce a relatively simple formulation.