ABSTRACT
This chapter treats the phenomenological radiative transfer theory as a corollary of statistical wave theory. The salient features of this approach vividly manifest themselves already in the relatively simple example of free radiation which will be our point of departure in discussing this topic. The reader is assumed to be familiar with the main concepts of random field theory in an amount approximately corresponding to the expositions in the books of Ishimaru (1978) and Rytov, Kravtsov, and Tatarskii (1989b).
