• Celebration of Scholars 2020

  • Atmospheric Gas Loss in Hot Jupiters Under Variable Stellar Irradiation
  • Automated Repair of Buffer Overflow
  • Biogeochemical Cycling of Nutrient Elements in Stormwater Retention Ponds
  • Bioinformatic Investigation of Nuclear Transport
  • Buried Alive: Ecology of the Infaunal Sponge Oceanapia
  • Caloric Load Preferentially Influences Epithelial Differentiation in the Murine Uterus to Drive Endometrial Hyperplasia
  • A Compilation of Systems That Are Both Novae and Dwarf Novae
  • Computer Modeling of Nucleophilic Substitution and Beta Elimination Reactions
  • Cubed Sphere: Simulating Tilted Black Hole Accretion Disk and Their Effects on Astrophysical Jets
  • Data Visualization: From Covid-19 to Back on the Bricks
  • Designing a Mobile Flood Warning Application for the Charleston, SC Region
  • Developing a Mobile Application for Flood Warning in the Charleston, SC Region
  • Discovering Authorship of Flawed Code Snippets
  • Dynamic Network Activation of Hypothalamic Neurons in REM Sleep
  • Effect of Storage Temperature and Time on Urine Electrolyte Assessment
  • Effects of Changeover-Requirement Location on Between-Sequence Variation in Pigeons
  • The Effects of Estradiol Treatment on Synaptic Reorganization and Plasticity Around Motoneurons After Traumatic Peripheral Nerve Injury in Mice.
  • Effects of Steroid Hormones on Voluntary Physical Activity Levels
  • Encountering Overdose: An Analysis of College Students' Overdose Experiences
  • Evolution of Pelvis Musculoskeletal Anatomy in Lizards
  • Examining the Back To Bricks Reopening Plan on Various Demographics Within Charleston
  • Expanding LGBTQ+ Responsiveness at CofC Student Health Services
  • Expression-building in Squid 3
  • Growing Up Salty: The Effects of Transient Salinity on Tadpole Growth, Behavior, and Development
  • HailPoint, Broadcasting, and Social Media
  • A Hubble Space Telescope Direct Imaging Investigation of Extrasolar Planets
  • Inter-comparison of Rainfall Measurements from 1- and 2-Dimensional Video Disdrometers
  • Investigating Nanocolloids Using Shadowgraphy
  • Investigating the Effect of Episodic Stellar Activity on Planetary Evolution
  • Investigating Truncated Disk Simulations for Signs of Quasi Periodic Oscillations
  • Lower Extremity Jump-Landing Biomechanics After Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction with Quadriceps Tendon Versus Patellar Tendon Autografts
  • Mapping Water in the Outer Asteroid Belt - Origins of Life
  • Mars Map Maker: User Empowerment in Meta Data and Data Submission
  • MARS: Middleware for Assisting the Registration of Samples
  • Patterns Observed on Mussel Bed Formation
  • Preliminary Analysis of Bulk Rain Variables Acquired from Laser Precipitation Monitors Mounted at Different Heights on a Vertical Tower
  • Progress Toward Anti-microbial Polymers: Adventures in Small Molecule Synthesis and Polymer Synthesis
  • Properly Resolving the Effective Measurement Area in a High-Fidelity Rain Measurement Device
  • A Religious History of the College of Charleston
  • Simulations of Light Transmission Through a Virtual Cloud
  • Strongly Magnetized Disks & Thermal Stability
  • Subdividing Rain Drop Arrivals into Steady Intervals
  • Synthesis and Spectral Characterization of 6-membered Silanes
  • Teaching Data Science Skills with a Focus on Visualization
  • Thermochemistry of Novel Polymers
  • A Tomographic Scan of the Accretion Disk Around a Supermassive Black Hole
  • Topsoil: An Open-Source Visualization Engine for Geochronological Data
  • Tropical Cyclone Climatology for Columbia and Greenville SC
  • Two-scale Factor Universality of O2: Experiments Under Density Gradients
  • Uncertainty of Heterogeneous Freezing Rate of Water on Muscovite Mica
  • The Use and Abuse of Philosophy in History: James Warley Miles and the Dangers of Racist Dehistoricization
  • Using Sentinel-2 MSI Data to Monitor the Physical Environment of Coral Reefs in the U.S. Virgin Islands
  • Virtual Assistant for Pair Programming (VAPP)
  • Women with HIV's Perception of Coercion During Contraceptive and Infant Feeding Counseling

Student: Christopher Blouin

Major: Physics

Mentors: Dr. Michael L. Larsen

Department: Physics and Astronomy

Simulations of Light Transmission Through a Virtual Cloud

The propagation of energy through the atmosphere depends on the interactions between light and matter, like clouds, aerosol particles, and gases making up the atmosphere. The field of radiative transfer focuses on these interactions, with particular emphasis on studying the cumulative impact of scattering and absorption of light when interacting with atmospheric particles. Simulation techniques in this discipline typically do not resolve individual particles, but rather treat the atmosphere as a continuous undifferentiated substance. A new tool, developed by collaborators at Michigan Technological University, allows for resolving individual particle locations in a modestly sized (~2m x 0.2m x 0.2m) atmospheric volume with realistic cloud-like droplet number density and particle spatial distributions.

Computational tradeoffs often need to be made in order to explore the variety of atmospheric conditions that are realistic while still completing the simulations in a reasonable amount of time. One of these tradeoffs is to approximate an exact treatment of the light-particle scattering/absorption interaction with a smoothed approximation.

Here, we investigate the degree to which using this approximation influences the reported light transmission through a simulated cloud volume by comparing the approximate results to the exact theoretical treatment. Preliminary results suggest that differences are notable even when millions of particles and hundreds of thousands of photons are used to run the simulation.