News
A new version of ARTS is now available. Many changes have gone into ARTS since the 2.4.0 release. Below you find some key features and improvements in ARTS 2.6.0:
- extension to shortwave radiation
- support of measured cross-section data (e.g. HITRAN absorption cross sections)
- new clear-sky solver with support for shortwave radiation (iyClearsky)
- molecular scattering (clear-sky Rayleigh scattering)
- improved DISORT interface
- much improved Python integration
We recommend to install ARTS in Miniforge3 with conda install -c rttools pyarts. Further details can be found on the documentation page.
Summer 2024 is drawing closer, and so is the highlight of this summer, the ARTS radiative transfer workshop at Kristineberg research station, on the Swedish west coast.
The workshop will be on June 4-7, 2024 (from noon to noon). The target audience are users and developers of the atmospheric radiative transfer simulator ARTS, and also anyone interested in spectroscopy or radiation that can give us new impulses.
Halocarbons contribute approximately 20% of the total anthropogenic instantaneous clear-sky forcing. We have implemented a new absorption model for them, based on HITRAN cross-section data, and use it to calculate forcing estimates:
Buehler, S. A., M. Brath, O. Lemke, Ø. Hodnebrog, R. Pincus, P. Eriksson, I. Gordon, and R. Larsson (2022),
A new halocarbon absorption model based on HITRAN cross-section data and new estimates of halocarbon instantaneous clear-sky radiative forcing,
J. Adv. Model. Earth Syst., 14(11), e2022MS003239, doi: 10.1029/2022MS003239.
We are pleased to announce that version 1.1.0 of the ARTS scattering database has been released. Database, technical report and readme document have been updated.
It is highly recommended to download both the new interface and database versions. They are found at the same places on Zenodo as v1.0: Database and Database Interfaces.
Today we're happy to announce the release of ARTS 2.4. Since the last release in 2014, development has carried on and many new features and improvements have found its way into ARTS. Below you find a list of the most important changes.
Links to source code and documentation can be found on the Getting ARTS page.
Updated atmlab and arts-xml-data packages are available as well.
Thanks to all of you who have been using ARTS in the past years for their science. We're looking forward to your feedback and contributions.
Key features
- New improved format for line-by-line data
- Non-LTE (pure-rotational non-overlapping, and non-chemical cases)
- Dedicated methods for heating rate calculations
- Basic simulations of radars (both single and multiple scattering)
- Radio link calculations not supported in this version
- Interfaces to DISORT and RT4 scattering solvers
- Jacobian for new quantities:
- spectroscopic variables
- particle properties (approximative)
- OEM type inversions inside ARTS
- TELSEM and TESSEM surface models
- PyARTS: Python bindings for ARTS
General
- Radiative transfer code (except MC) totally revised, including:
- Higher consistency between modules
- Higher calculation efficiency
- Jacobian of atmospheric variables now fully analytical
- Absorption/LBL revised
- Support for new lineshapes
- Performance improvements
- New and extended system for defining particle size distributions
- DOIT improvements
- Optimized pressure grid
- Convergence acceleration
- Optional precalculated first-guess field
- New sensor setup for passband-type, meteorological millimeter instruments (sensor_responseMetMM)
Known Issues
- TestSpectroscopy fails on macOS
Stay healthy and enjoy,
The ARTS Developers
We mourn the loss of Michael Mishchenko, longterm chief editor of JQSRT, and author of light scattering textbooks. Over the years, he helped the development of ARTS and the community around it in many ways. As editor he defended the value of papers on model development at a time when this was not self-understood, and there were no other journals dedicated to the topic. As scientist and scattering expert he was always happy to share his wisdom and help us overcome practical obstacles and theoretical confusions. And as a person he was always open, friendly and supportive. Michael Mishchenko died on July 21. The official obituary page of NASA GISS is https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20200727/. We will miss him very much.
Dear friends of ARTS,
Considering the covid-19 outbreak we have decided to cancel the workshop completely.
We find it highly unlikely that the situation is back to normal in time for the workshop. We also expect that the workload during the coming months will be higher than normal, particularly to handle teaching, and for this reason we also gave up on making the workshop by video.
Best regards,
Patrick and Stefan
Dear radiative transfer friend,
We are pleased to announce a new workshop in the series of "ARTS workshops". You don't need to be an ARTS user or developer to participate, the workshop is open for all with an interest in atmospheric radiative transfer. There is normally a strong focus on microwave to infrared radiative transfer, but also other wavelength regions are of interest.
A novelty is that it will be possible to join remotely. Further information is found below.
The place is the same as last time, Kristineberg (about 100 km north of Gothenburg). Time for the actual workshop: June 9-11 (Tuesday morning to Thursday lunch). We will arrange transport between Gothenburg and Kristineberg. A bus will departure from Gothenburg around 14:30 June 8, and we are back in Gothenburg around 15:00 June 11. That is, you need to arrive to Gothenburg not too late Jun 8, and should have possibility to travel back home June 11.
The general goal of the workshop is as usual, that the ARTS user community (and also people working with other RT models) can meet, get to know each other, solve practical problems, and discuss the further development of the program. As always, we will have a limited number of talks, to leave time for group work and discussions. The present main development of ARTS is directed towards the release of ARTS3, planned for later this year, involving
- Overhauled line-by-line absorption calculations
- Better (and faster) representation of particles
- Scattering calculations across the spectrum
- Documentation and user examples
- Extending OEM retrievals (surface variables, multiple instruments ...) but the workshop is not restricted to these topics.
If you are interested in participating, then please fill in the pre-registration form at
in order to allow us plan the program. The deadline for pre-registration is March 15. Since the available space at Kristineberg is limited, we have to limit the meeting to roughly 30 persons. If more persons are interested, it will be first come first served.
Kristineberg is a marine research station. The station offers full board and lodging, but the number of rooms is limited and most workshop participants will need to share double rooms. If you require a single room indicate this under Comments. Transport to/from Gothenburg is arranged at start/end of workshop. You only pay for room and food at Kristineberg. We can not yet give you an exact price, but it should be in the order of 300 euro for the entire time.
We also aim for making it possible to participate by video. The presentation sessions will be streamed, but it should also be possible to partly follow the group work. We will have equipment to remotely join one or two groups.
Please note, we really want to make remote participation possible, but we can not leave any guarantees and this option is so far on best effort basis.
If you plan to follow the workshop by video, send an email to <patrick.eriksson (at) chalmers.se> including this information:
- If you want to follow presentations
- If you would like to give a presentation: title + abstract
- If you will be interested in joining group work
Kind regards,
Patrick Eriksson,
Stefan Buehler
Dear ARTS friends,
It's time for a new ARTS workshop. The workshop will be similar to the old ones, but this time we have also something to celebrate. The ARTS project is approaching an age of 20 years! And if all goes well, we will announce ARTS-3 some time before the workshop.
The workshop will be held June 8-11, 2020. The venue will again be Kristineberg Marine Research Station, on the west coast of Sweden. You will need to be in Gothenburg around 14.00 June 8, and be back in Gothenburg around 15.00 June 11.
Mark this time period in your calendar. The invitation will be sent out in January.
If you are not familiar with these workshops, see: http://www.radiativetransfer.org/events
(We are aware of that the IPWG and IWSSM workshops just were announced to be June 1-5. This is unlucky but we can not move the ARTS workshop as Kristeneberg is fully booked.)
Kind regards,
Stefan and Patrick
We are pleased to announce that the ARTS Microwave Single Scattering Properties Database (Oriented Particles) has been released and is available for download on Zenodo.
The database contains microwave and submillimeter wave single scattering data of azimuthally randomly oriented frozen hydrometeors. It contains one aggregate habit and one pristine ice crystal habit. Furthermore, 35 frequencies from 1 to 886 GHz, and 3 temperatures, 190, 230 and 270 K, are included.
The Python3 interface of ARTS Microwave Single Scattering Properties Database Interfaces, can be used for browsing and importing of the single scattering data of azimuthally randomly oriented.
- Buehler, S. A., J. Mendrok, P. Eriksson, A. Perrin, R. Larsson, and O. Lemke (2018), ARTS, the atmospheric radiative transfer simulator — version 2.2, the planetary toolbox edition, Geosci. Model Dev., 11(4), 1537–1556, doi:10.5194/gmd-11-1537-2018 (pdf).
This version offers a new planetary toolbox that allows simulations for the planets Venus, Mars and Jupiter, in addition to Earth. Further new features are radio link budgets, back-scattering radar simulations, and the treatment of Faraday rotation and Zeeman splitting.
You can find all articles about ARTS on the documentation page.
A new beta version of the ARTS microwave single scattering properties database is now available. Changes include fixes and improvements in documentation, post DDA processing, and interface.
In specific, we have added an ATBD document, providing more detailed database documentation. Also, thanks to feedback given, we have improved upon the conversion of DDA to database stored scattering quantities. For example, this has an improved effect when deriving triple frequency signatures.
Furthermore, we have prepared a set of ARTS-ready and easy to use scattering data in the ARTS xml-format. A total of 16 so called standard habits are provided here.
As before, the database is still in beta, meaning that the database is not fully completed and issues are likely still present. We would be very happy to receive any feedback on issues and bugs encountered.
A beta version of a new single scattering database of mainly ice particles that has been calculated using the discrete dipole approximation method (DDA) is now available for download.
We are pleased to announce a new workshop in the series of "ARTS workshops". You don't need to be an ARTS user or developer to participate, the workshop is open for all with an interest in atmospheric radiative transfer. There is normally a strong focus on microwave to infrared radiative transfer, but also other wavelength regions are of interest.
The place is the same as last time, Kristineberg (about 100 km north of Gothenburg). Time for the actual workshop: September 6-8 (Wednesday morning to Friday lunch). We will arrange transport between Gothenburg and Kristineberg, and it will departure from Gothenburg around 15.00 September 5. That is you need to arrive to Gothenburg not too late Sep 5, and should have possibility to travel back Sep 8.
The general goal of the workshop is as usual, that the ARTS user community (and also people working with other RT models) can meet, get to know each other, solve practical problems, and discuss the further development of the program. As always, we will have only a relatively small number of talks, and instead more time for group work and discussions. The present/planned main development of ARTS is directed towards
- Faster scattering calculations
- Running OEM inside ARTS
- Non-LTE
but the workshop is not restricted to these topics.
If you are interested in participating, then please fill in the pre-registration form in order to allow us plan the program. The deadline for pre-registration is March 31. Since the available space at Kristineberg is limited, we have to limit the meeting to roughly 25 persons. If more persons are interested, it will be first come first served.
Kristineberg is a marine research station. The station offers full board and lodging, but the number of rooms is limited and most workshop participants will need to share double rooms. At the moment there are only three single rooms at hand. If you require a single room indicate this under Comments. Transport to/from Gothenburg is arranged at start/end of workshop. You only pay for room and food at Kristineberg. We can not yet give you en exact price, but it should be in the order of 250 euro.
Although there hasn't been a new stable ARTS release in a while, the ARTS team is very busy working on new features in the development branch. To give you a glimpse of the current development, here is a list of some features we're working on:
- Line mixing calculations.
- Consideration of non-LTE effects.
- Several optimizations have be applied to DOIT, one of ARTS' scattering solvers. This includes an improved conversion algorithm and an optimized pressure grid. More enhancements are still being worked on.
- Integration of the RT4 polarized model for horizontally oriented particles by Frank Evans into ARTS as an additional scattering solver.
- Integration of the NWP SAF sea surface model FASTEM into ARTS.
- ARTS' internal catalog format (ARTSCAT-5) has been improved and now supports storage of various pressure broadening schemes, various line mixing schemes and quantum numbers.
- Overhaul of the Disort integration.
Once the dust settles and the new features are polished, we hope to release a new stable ARTS version in the near future.
The Hudson automated build service for ARTS has been migrated to the server in Hamburg. The new location is: https://arts.mi.uni-hamburg.de/hudson/.
Due to its current unmaintained and largely broken state, we decided that we can't support PyARTS anymore. Download links for PyARTS have been removed. We hope to start a new, better Python package in the near future.
We're pleased to announce the release of ARTS version 2.2.
Some of the new key features in this release are:
- Support for other planets
- Radio links
- Zeeman splitting
- Named arguments
- in-ARTS pnd_field calculations from atmospheric fields
- in-ARTS scat_data calculations by Mie or T-matrix
For a detailed list of changes, have a look at the CHANGES-2.2 file in the ARTS distribution.
Alongside with ARTS, new 2.2 versions of atmlab, arts-xml-data and PyARTS are available as well.
Download instructions can be found on the Getting ARTS and Related tools pages.
This means that the 2.0 versions are no longer maintained.
After a long pause, we will this year again have an international ARTS community workshop in Kristineberg, Sweden, June 9 to 11, 2014. The workshop is fully booked, but please contact the developers if you want to be put on the waiting list in case somebody hops off.
Picture: Oliver Lemke
Picture: Benh Lieu Song, Wikimedia Commons
The Pont des Arts or Passerelle des Arts is a pedestrian bridge in Paris which crosses the Seine River. It links the Institut de France and the central square (cour carrée) of the palais du Louvre, (which had been termed the "Palais des Arts" under the First Empire). Source: Wikipedia
We would like announce that the development of ARTS in the Subversion trunk is moving on to version 2.1. If you like to stick with the latest stable version, we recommend that you switch to the new 2.0 branch. Head over to the 'Getting ARTS' page to learn how to checkout the latest stable version.
The version numbers of related tools like atmlab and PyARTS have been increased to 2.0 to reflect compatibility with the corresponding ARTS version. Download information is available on the 'Related Tools' page.
Non-subversion users can find all stable packages at /arts/misc/download/stable/2.0/.
In comparison to version 1 (by us now denoted as ARTS-1), this ARTS version is a much more sophisticated software (summary below). Most of these features have been in place since years. More lately, we have spent time on the documentation and this is the reason to why we now declare that ARTS has reached version 2 status.
ARTS is a state-of-the-art radiative transfer model for the thermal spectral region:
- The model atmosphere can be 1D, 2D or 3D.
- Spherical geoid and surface are throughout default. For 2D and 3D more complex topography are also possible.
- Radiative transfer can be made for 1–4 Stokes elements. Polarisation effects can thus be fully described.
- Basically no restriction in complexity of surface reflection (but is currently handled only in a simplistic manner).
- For particle single scattering properties, not only the standard assumption of spherical or completely randomly oriented particles, but also the case of horizontally aligned particles is handled.
- Two modules for solving radiative transfer with particle scattering: MC and DOIT. Both modules lack intrinsic approximations, and have been verified by practical retrievals.
- Sensor responses can be incorporated in an efficient manner.
- Concept of agendas and include files for more flexibility in control files.
- Built-in HTTP documentation server.
For an introduction to the new features of ARTS, please have a look at the following JQSRT article:
- ARTS, the atmospheric radiative transfer simulator, Version 2, Eriksson, P., S. A. Buehler, C. P. Davis, C. Emde, and O. Lemke (2011), J. Quant. Spectrosc. Radiat. Transfer, doi:10.1016/j.jqsrt.2011.03.001. http://www.radiativetransfer.org/docs/arts-2-0-paper.pdf
We recommend to get the latest source code directly from our Subversion repository. This is the easiest way for you to keep your ARTS version up to date. Instructions on how to get ARTS from Subversion can be found at: http://www.radiativetransfer.org/arts/getarts/
If you can't use Subversion, you can also get the latest snapshot of the ARTS source code package at http://www.radiativetransfer.org/arts/misc/download/arts2/
Have fun, The ARTS developers
Presentations and pictures from the Open ARTS Community Workshop 2010 are now available on the workshop website. Thanks to all participants for their contributions.
Today we released Atmlab version 1.0.0, a collection of Matlab functions for interaction with the latest ARTS. The download is available on the ARTS Tools page.
For ARTS 1.0 users, a new Qpack maintenance release is available on the same page.
The Open ARTS Community Workshop will be held in Kristineberg, Sweden from June 7 to 10, 2010. For details, see the workshop homepage.
ARTS has now an automated build system which provides up-to-the-minute builds as well as an archive of previous versions. The build is automatically performed on different architectures (Linux, Mac) and with different compiler versions (GCC 4.2, 4.4). This should help us to spot compatibility problems more easily.
ARTS release 1.0.214.
Recent changes:
- AMI: Some matlab files where missing from the package. (P. Eriksson)
- Fix compilation with gcc 4.3. (O. Lemke)
A detailed list of changes can be found in the ChangeLog file.
An updated windows executable of the latest development version of arts (1.3.35) is now available on the downloads page. The package also contains an example controlfile. Just download the zip file, follow the steps in the README.txt, and you're good to go.
ARTS release 1.0.208.
Recent changes:
- Added support for reading Hitran 2004 catalogue files (H. Berg/O. Lemke)
- AMI: HMatrix backend modified to allow different channel response. Nothing is changed concerning input-output, so it works fine with all code. (C. Jimenez)
- ybatchFromRadiosonde: Added a keyword *za_per_profile* to use separate za_pencil for each radiosonde. (V. Oommen-John)
- AMI: Fixes for obsolete matlab functions. (P. Eriksson).
- Renamed aux directory to misc. Fixes problem when building arts under Cygwin (O. Lemke)
A detailed list of changes can be found in the ChangeLog file.
The ARTS repository has been moved from Bremen to our new server in Kiruna. At the same time we have switched from CVS to Subversion as a version control system. Updated information how to get the ARTS source code is available at the download page.
The page also contains information for developers on how the procedure to commit changes has changed with Subversion.
The seventh Bredbeck radiative transfer workshop will take place on June 20-23, 2005. Anybody involved in the field of radiative transfer modeling or data retrieval is invited to join the workshop. Online registration is now possible on the workshop homepage.
Recent changes:
- Bug fixed in *groundFlatSea* (P. Eriksson)
- Updates in IDL (aii) routines (C. Melsheimer, A. von Engeln)
- Updates in Matlab (ami) routines (P. Eriksson, M. Ekström)
- Updated coefficients in the partition function lookup table (C. Verdes)
- Improved build system compatibility (O. Lemke)
Bredbeck Workshop 2004: From June 21 to 24, our annual Radiative Transfer Workshop takes place at Haus Bredbeck. Online registration is possible on the workshop homepage.
Bredbeck Workshop 2003: From July 7. to 10., our annual Radiative Transfer Workshop takes place at Haus Bredbeck. A registration form could be found on the workshop homepage.
ARTS release 1.0.65.
Recent changes:
- bug in lineshape cutoff fixed
- add of Ma and Tipping continuum taken from
Q. Ma and R. H. Tipping
Water vapor millimeter wave foreign continuum: a Lanczos calculation in the coordinate representation
JCHP, 2002, Vol. 117, pp. 10581-10596 - update of some IDL procedures (procedure to calculate continuum parameters from a data set is added)
Have a look at the ARTS anonymous CVS access section to learn how to the get the latest ARTS version directly from CVS.
ARTS LXR interface available. It provides a cross-referenced version of the arts-1.0.x and current development code tree with search capabilities.
ARTS release 1.0.38. Several bug fixes. Look at the ChangeLog for details.
ARTS release 1.0.31. Fixed compilation on SunOS and HP-UX with gcc 3.x.
Fixed some bugs in the physics as well as in the build system. For details have a look at the ChangeLog distributed with ARTS. Look at the compatibility section to see on which platforms ARTS has been reported to work.
Compilation without HDF did not work properly. Get the latest version from the download page.
Finally, after two years of development and sedulous comparisons with other transfer models, we decided to make the first stable release of ARTS available for the public. Have a look at the download page or follow this link to download the package directly.
To find out more about ARTS you could download the user guide in ps or pdf format or write a mail to one of the addresses mentioned on the support page at the bottom of this page. It would also be nice if you could send us some feedback about your experiences with installing and using ARTS to give us the possibility to extend our program to match the needs of its users.
