A theoretical model on radiative properties of air plasma-sprayed (APS) 8 wt% yttria stabilized zirconia (8YSZ) thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) is proposed and validated. Starting from analysis of microstructures, pores inside the coating are regarded as scatterers. Dependent scattering effects among scatterers are thoroughly considered in the framework of quasicrystalline approximation (QCA) and Percus-Yevick (P-Y) pair distribution function for sticky hard spherical particles, in which large nonspherical pores are treated as clusters of the elemental pores. Afterwards, the Monte Carlo (MC) method is used to solve the radiative transfer problem inside TBCs based on the radiative properties. The predicted optical responses including reflectance, transmittance and absorptance of TBC slabs with different thicknesses agree well with the experimental data. The widely used independent scattering assumption in conventional studies is also investigated and examined to be inapplicable in the semitransparent spectral region of TBCs, especially between around 3.2 and 5.6 mu m. This study provides a simple and physically robust direct prediction on radiative properties of TBCs solely based on their microstructures and bulk optical properties of the material. Moreover, the present method can be easily applied to the studies on radiative properties of other semitransparent porous media. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.