ON THE TRANSMITTANCE OF RADIATION THROUGH INHOMOGENEOUS MOLECULAR $GASES^{\ast}$

$^{\ast}$ This work was supported by the United States Air Force.Author Institution: Defense Research CorporationThe quasi-random model gives a convenient, and quantitatively accurate representation of molecular spectral line distributions which reduces directly to the exact expression for the transmittance of overlapping lines. This approximation has been used successfully to obtain the transmittance of homogeneous molecular paths. The distinction between the homogeneous and inhomogeneous problems is essentially a mathematical one, with the latter requiring the solution of an additional integral, the form of which depends upon the shape of the spectral lines. An analysis of this inhomogeneous path problem will be described and an approximate method for treating certain cases (high altitude atmosphere paths) will be given