A radiative transfer algorithm for the atmosphere-ocean system based on the finite-element method

The finite element method (FEM) is applied to solve the problem of transfer of unpolarised monochromatic radiation in a multi-layered nonuniformly refractive medium, i.e. the coupled atmosphere-ocean system. The resulting model ensures energy conservation independently of the adopted phase function, the number of grid points and the relative refractive index. The theoretical basis is here presented together with a number of applications on realistic atmosphere-ocean systems.