The coupling of MATISSE and the SE-WORKBENCH: a new solution for simulating efficiently the atmospheric radiative transfer and the sea surface radiation

Abstract

The SE-WORKBENCH workshop, also called CHORALE (French acceptation for "simulated Optronic Acoustic Radar battlefield") is used by the French DGA (MoD) and several other Defense organizations and companies all around the World to perform multi-sensors simulations. CHORALE enables the user to create virtual and realistic multi spectral 3D scenes that may contain several types of target, and then generate the physical signal received by a sensor, typically an IR sensor. The SE-WORKBENCH can be used either as a collection of software modules through dedicated GUIs or as an API made of a large number of specialized toolkits. The SE-WORKBENCH is made of several functional block: one for geometrically and physically modeling the terrain and the targets, one for building the simulation scenario and one for rendering the synthetic environment, both in real and non real time. Among the modules that the modeling block is composed of, SE-ATMOSPHERE is used to simulate the atmospheric conditions of a Synthetic Environment and then to integrate the impact of these conditions on a scene. This software product generates an exploitable physical atmosphere by the SE WORKBENCH tools generating spectral images. It relies on several external radiative transfer models such as MODTRAN V4.2 in the current version. MATISSE [4,5] is a background scene generator developed for the computation of natural background spectral radiance images and useful atmospheric radiative quantities (radiance and transmission along a line of sight, local illumination, solar irradiance ...). Backgrounds include atmosphere, low and high altitude clouds, sea and land. A particular characteristic of the code is its ability to take into account atmospheric spatial variability (temperatures, mixing ratio, etc) along each line of sight. An Application Programming Interface (API) is included to facilitate its use in conjunction with external codes. MATISSE is currently considered as a new external radiative transfer model to be integrated in SE-ATMOSPHERE as a complement to MODTRAN. Compared to the latter which is used as a whole MATISSE can be used step by step and modularly as an API: this can avoid to pre compute large atmospheric parameters tables as it is done currently with MODTRAN. The use of MATISSE will also enable a real coupling between the ray tracing process of the SEWORKBENCH and the radiative transfer model of MATISSE. This will lead to the improvement of the link between a general atmospheric model and a specific 3D terrain. The paper will demonstrate the advantages for the SE WORKEBNCH of using MATISSE as a new atmospheric code, but also for computing the radiative properties of the sea surface.