Design note: atmosphere

Design note: atmosphere#

Eradiate internally represents the atmosphere as a cuboid and the surface as a rectangle. When positioning both shapes during kernel initialisation, they must not overlap, i.e. be positioned at exactly the same altitude: ray-surface intersection would otherwise become unpredictable and results would be wrong.

For this reason, Eradiate makes the shape delimiting the atmosphere slightly larger than it actually should and offsets it so that the bottom of the atmosphere’s kernel shape does not exactly coincide with the surface.

In addition, the Atmosphere interface defines a series of attributes required to position the atmosphere’s kernel shape vertically:

  • top is the altitude corresponding to the so-called “top of atmosphere” level;

  • bottom is the altitude corresponding to the ground level;

  • height is equal to top - bottom;

  • kernel_offset is the distance by which the atmosphere’s kernel shape should be offset (towards lower altitudes) to prevent ray intersection issues at surface level;

  • kernel_height is the height of the kernel shape and is equal to height + kernel_offset.

../../_images/atmosphere_attributes.svg