We present some preliminary results and discussion of our ongoing effort to develop a prototype volumetric atmospheric optical refraction simulator which uses three-dimensional (3D) nonlinear ray-tracing and state of-art physics-based rendering techniques. The tool will allow simulation of optical curved-ray propagation through nonlinear refractivity gradient profiles in volumetric atmospheric participating media, and the generation of radiometrically accurate images of the resulting atmospheric refraction phenomena, including inferior and superior mirages, over-the-horizon viewing conditions, looming and sinking, towering and stooping of distant objects. The ability to accurately model and predict atmospheric optical refraction conditions and phenomena is important in both defense and commercial applications. Our nonlinear refractive ray-trace method is currently CPU-parallelized and is well-suited for GPU compute implementation.