Spectral Bio-signature Simulation of full 3-D Earth with Multi-layer Atmospheric Model and Sea Ice Coverage Variation

In recent years, many candidates for extra-solar planet have been discovered from various measurement techniques. Fueled by such discoveries, new space missions for direct detection of earth-like planets have been proposed and actively studied. TPF instrument is a fair example of such scientific endeavors. One of the many technical problems that space missions such as TPF would need to solve is deconvolution of the collapsed (i.e. spatially and temporally) spectral signal arriving at the detector surface and the deconvolution computation may fall into a local minimum solution, instead of the global minimum solution, in the optimization process, yielding mis-interpretation of the spectral signal from the potential earth-like planets. To this extend, observational and theoretical understanding on the spectral bio-signal from the Earth serves as the key reference datum for the accurate interpretation of the planetary bio-signatures from other star systems. In this study, we present ray tracing computational model for the on-going simulation study on the Earth bio-signatures. A multi-layered atmospheric model and sea ice variation model were added to the existing target Earth model and a hypothetical space instrument (called AmonRa) observed the spectral bio-signals of the model Earth from the L1 halo orbit. The resulting spectrums of the Earth show well known "red-edge" spectrums as well as key molecular absorption lines important to harbor life forms. The model details, computational process and the resulting bio-signatures are presented together with implications to the future study direction.