The Atmospheric Radiative Transfer Simulator Arts, Version 2.6 — Deep Python Integration

The atmospheric radiative transfer simulator ARTS is a software for computing atmospheric absorption, scattering, the transfer of radiation through an atmosphere, and sensor characteristics. It is written in C++ and can simulate remote sensing observations and radiative energy fluxes. The article describes version 2.6 of the software. There are numerous changes compared to the last ARTS publication, the most striking being that the program is now controlled by Python scripts, which is convenient and allows for great flexibility. The article discusses the ARTS history, the theory behind the computations of absorption and radiative transfer, available solvers for atmospheres with scattering, the computation of energy fluxes and heating rates, and the built-in system for inverting remote observations to atmospheric state variables by optimal estimation. ARTS is publicly available, open source, and free of charge.