Building Opacity Tables

This page describes the main steps required to build new opacity tables for the Generic PCM.

There are three important steps to consider:

• (1) calculate high-resolution spectra for a grid of pressures, temperatures and mixing ratios.
• (2) convert these high-resolution spectra into correlated-k tables
• (3) add continuum opacity tables

Calculation of high-resolution spectra

describe the tools we used :

• k-spectrum
• home-made scripts

Building correlated-k tables

describe the tools we used:

• home-made scripts
• exo-k (http://perso.astrophy.u-bordeaux.fr/~jleconte/exo_k-doc/index.html)

Several important notes:

• The units of correlated-k tables is cm^2/molec.
• The format of correlated-k tables is (n_temperature, n_pressure, n_vmr, n_band, n_gauss)

Adding continuum opacities

Explain strategies to calculate continuum opacities

• Usually the continuum units used as input in the GCM is cm-1 amagat-2