Optical properties of the cirrus cloud ice crystals with preferred azimuthal orientation are required for current numerical models of the Earth's radiation balance. Retrieving the orientation distributions function of the crystals from a vertically pointing polarization lidar measuring the full Mueller matrix is a very complicated problem because of lake of information. Lidars with zenith scanning can be used only to retrieve the properties of horizontally oriented particles. The paper shows that if the particles have preferred azimuthal orientation, the polarization lidars with azimuthal scanning should be used. It is also shown that all the elements of the Mueller matrix give no extra information compare to the depolarization ratio. Optical properties of preferred azimuthal oriented hexagonal ice columns with size from 10 to 1000 μm for wavelengths of 0.355, 0.532 and 1.064 μm were collected as a data bank.

Date Published: 19 October 2016
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 10001, Remote Sensing of Clouds and the Atmosphere XXI, 100010Z (19 October 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2241753

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10001:
Remote Sensing of Clouds and the Atmosphere XXI
Adolfo Comerón; Evgueni I. Kassianov; Klaus Schäfer, Editor(s)