kCARTA is a pseudo-monochromatic radiative transfer code, which uses
an accurately pre-computed database of optical depths. The code was
designed to be the Reference ClearSky Forward Model for NASA's AIRS
instrument, which is a hyperspectral infared nadir sounder. This means
the infrared (605-2830 cm-1) optical depths and clear sky radiances,
at 0.0025 cm-1 resolution, have been extensively compared against
other codes (such as GENLN) and validated during numerous AIRS
campaigns.

The kCARTA code is designed to be fast, accurate and easy-to-use;
compressed optical depths come from a Matlab-based line-by-line code
which currently uses the HITRAN 2012 lineshape parameters, with CO2
linemixing and MT-CKDv2.5 water continuum.

In addition, some scattering and radiative flux routines are packaged
with the code, and the optical depth databse has been extended to
encompass 15 - 44000 cm-1 (FIR to UV), though we only provide limited
support for these. kCARTA is available both in f77 and Matlab.

In order to run kCARTA, the user also needs to install/download
a) hdf packages
b) rtp package, which is our native file format for storing
   atmospheric geophysical variables and instrument view geometry
   parameters, needed for RT calculations
c) klayers package, which takes in a LEVELS rtp file and profuces a LAYERS avg rtp
   file, needed for RT calculations

NOTE
We have included our scattering interface routines with the git
package. They are completely unsupported at this point (ie purely for
our research).  The PCLSAM (Parameterization for Cloud Longwave
Scattering for Use in Atmospheric Models, J. Clim 1999 by Chou et. al,
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/1520-0442-12.1.159) is used in a number
of fast RTA models (eg SARTA and RTTOVS), and is included here in a
TwoSlab and 100 layer version. It has been tested as much as
possible. In addition RTSPEC by F. Evans (http://nit.colorado.edu/
rtspec/README), as well as kTWOSTREAM (see eg Infrared dust spectral
signatures from AIRS, GRL 2006, DOI: 10.1029/2005GL024364) have also
been interfaced and tested. The other codes (DISORT, PERTURB etc) are
purely experimental and not been tested.

Code was developed jointly by
  L.Larrabee Strow        Principal Investigator
  Sergio DeSouza-Machado  Radiative Transfer, Jacobians, Fluxes, Scattering
  Howard Motteler         SVD Compression and OD uncompression routines
  Scott Hannon            Code testing, developing, overseeing