Fast method for calculating infrared spectral transmittances in the wings of absorption lines

When performing line-by-line simulations of atmospheric high-resolution infrared spectra, a large portion of the computation time is spent in the calculation of the absorptions by the far wings of the absorption lines. For applications in which one is interested mainly in evaluating the effective absorption in a microwindow, a computationally less expensive method has been developed. The method is faster than the explicit line-by-line calculation by a factor proportional to the number of line wings that contribute to the absorption in the simulated microwindow. This paper presents the method and demonstrates its performances in the 700-1400cm-1 infrared band. Typically one obtains a gain in computation time of order 25.