Exponential flat atmosphere

created merge request !89 (closed) to address this issue

mentioned in merge request !89 (closed)

Is it planed to include composition changes inside the atmosphere depending on height or is the effect much to small to notice?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#/media/File:Msis_atmospheric_composition_by_height.svg

There are two points about this:

1. to all knowledge the atmosphere within 100km is basically perfectly mixed. If you look at at density profile you also see that the density profile above 100km is less than insignificant.
2. for space based experiments it might matter what happens at very great height (or i.e. UV-absorbing ozone layer). But we could always implement this in CORSIKA8, either as a parametric variation with in a volumen, or just add another volume on top of the default one.

Ralf, perhaps you remember that we decided not to support inhomogeneous compositions when we were discussing the cascade "step" procedure with Felix. Supporting them would require to calculate and convert grammages

X_i

for each component

i

individually using their respective

\varrho_i(\bm x)

since you could not just use the cross-sections weighted by the fraction of number densities when sampling the next point of interaction - certainly doable but (currently) out of scope.

mentioned in merge request !92 (merged)

closed via merge request !92 (merged)

mentioned in commit 76bb33de

Yes, you are right. But this is no restriction, since we can just add dedicated new volumes.

Btw, here an ozone absorption spectrum:

Beside compositon humidity (& temperature) seems to be quite important for radio, cherenkov and flouresence measurements as well.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/0711.4583.pdf

Yes, but all those are properties that do not affect the atomic composition and thus in particular not the determination of grammages and interaction lengths.

There is no limit in extending the general list of properties of the environment.