[Crater-team] Comparison of GLACE and REDMoon lunar albedo models

[Mark D Looper]

Hello—

                This took longer than I had planned, in part because I was trying to be _very_ sure that I was right.  You’ll recall that Dobynde & Guo, JGR Planets (2021), DOI: 10.1029/2021JE006930, came out with a model called REDMoon of GCR secondary particles tabulating upward and downward fluxes at and below the lunar surface.  Since GLACE focuses on upward fluxes at and above the lunar surface, they are complementary, and I thought it would be valuable to compare our results with theirs.  Since they provided tables of the values that went into the figures of their paper (thank you, AGU “Open Science” requirements!) via Zenodo, I was able to plot their upward particle fluxes in the same format as the GLACE fluxes, and I assembled the attached PPTX to compare the two.

                You may recall that in 2018 we had a joint meeting with the LRO/LEND team, and I concluded that they had left out a cosine factor in the normalization of their simulations of albedo neutrons.  The REDMoon model contains the same error, as described (and corrected) in the attached PPTX.  The comparisons actually don’t look half bad, given differences of GCR model, regolith composition, and physics list, once the corrections are applied.  However, I don’t want to catch them by surprise with a fundamental criticism of their results (especially if they end up as reviewers of our paper, right?); moreover, they are “working on building a user-friendly online platform” to make their model results broadly available, so I’d like to get them the correction before they put that into production.  What do you think would be the most collegial way to approach this?

                I’m going to put the discussion of normalization from the attached PPTX (which I lifted from a PPTX I generated after our LEND meeting over five years ago!) as an appendix to the GLACE paper; it may be the most useful piece of the whole darn thing over the long term…

Thanks—
--Mark

Mark D. Looper, PhD
Space Sciences Department
The Aerospace Corporation
M/S M2-260
P.O. Box 92957
Los Angeles, CA 90009-2957
Mobile: 310-529-3406
Voicemail: 310-336-6302
Publications: https://www.loopers.org/curvitae.html
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