Radiative transfer

Radiative transfer describes how electromagnetic radiation propagates through matter as it is emitted, absorbed, and scattered.

Radiative transfer equation: An equation describing changes in radiation intensity along a path through emitting, absorbing, and scattering matter. It combines the processes that govern radiative transfer into a path-by-path balance.
Electromagnetic radiation: Energy propagated through space by oscillating electric and magnetic fields. Radiative transfer describes how this radiation behaves inside matter.
Atmospheric radiative transfer: The transport of radiation through Earth's atmosphere, including absorption, emission, and scattering. Atmospheric gases and aerosols alter sunlight and thermal infrared radiation.
Beer–Lambert law: A relation describing exponential attenuation of a beam by an absorbing medium. It treats direct-beam absorption, unlike transfer models that can include emission and scattering.
Inverse radiative transfer: The problem of inferring a medium's properties from measurements of radiation emerging from it. Many observations require recovering hidden material properties from transported radiation.
Specific intensity: Radiation energy crossing a unit area per unit time, frequency, and solid angle. It is the quantity whose change the transfer equation describes.
Absorption: The transfer of energy from radiation to matter during an interaction. Absorption removes energy from a radiation beam and heats or excites matter.
Radiative transfer in stars: The transport of radiation through stellar material, shaping energy flow and emergent spectra. It connects conditions inside a star to the spectrum observed at its surface.
Diffusion approximation: An approximation to radiation transport that treats intense scattering as diffusion. It simplifies transfer when scattering dominates and the radiation field is nearly isotropic.
Radiative transfer in turbulent media: The study of radiation transport through media whose density and structure fluctuate turbulently. Small-scale structure can change effective absorption and scattering in ways averages miss.

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