International Polarized Radiative Transfer

Case A 5: Liquid water cloud

The purpose of this test is to check whether the forward scattering peak and features of the phase matrix like the rainbow can be simulated. For this reason simulations in the principal plane and almucanter plane respectively are performed with an angular resolution of 1°.

Setup:

cloud optical thickness: 5
effective radius: 10 $\mu$m
cloud optical properties: netCDF,ascii
The variable “phase” includes the phase matrix, as a function of the scattering angle (variable “theta”). The 4×4 scattering phase matrix for spherical droplets has four non-zero elements, which are stored in the following order: $ P = \begin{pmatrix} P1 & P2 & 0 & 0 \\ P2 & P1 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & P3 & P4 \\ 0 & 0 & -P4 & P3 \end{pmatrix} $
The corresponding Legendre polynomials (“pmom”) and the single scattering albedo (“ssa”) are also included in the file.

The expansion moments over generalized spherical functions for the phase matrix have been provided by S. Korkin and are available here.