Technical Note: A novel parameterization of the transmissivity due to ozone absorption in the k-distribution method and correlated-k approximation of Kato et al. (1999) over the UV band

Abstract. The k-distribution method and the correlated-k approximation of Kato et al. (1999) is a computationally efficient approach originally designed for calculations of the broadband solar radiation at ground level by dividing the solar spectrum in 32 specific spectral bands from 240 to 4606 nm. Compared to a spectrally resolved computation, its performance in the UV band appears to be inaccurate, especially in the spectral intervals #3 [283, 307] nm and #4 [307, 328] nm because of inaccuracy in modeling the transmissivity due to ozone absorption. Numerical simulations presented in this paper indicate that a single effective ozone cross section is insufficient to accurately represent the transmissivity over each spectral interval. A novel parameterization of the transmissivity using more quadrature points yields maximum errors of respectively 0.0006 and 0.0143 for intervals #3 and #4. How to practically implement this new parameterization in a radiative transfer model is discussed for the case of libRadtran (library for radiative transfer). The new parameterization considerably improves the accuracy of the retrieval of irradiances in UV bands.