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GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, 33, L14820, doi:10.1029/2006GL026312, 2006.
Radiative transfer in clouds with small-scale inhomogeneities: Microphysical approach.
M. I. Mishchenko
Abstract
Several recent publications have indicated that cloud
droplets belonging to a particular size range may tend to
cluster by forming small random particle groups imbedded
in an otherwise uniform cloud. To analyze radiative transfer
in clouds with such small-scale inhomogeneities, we invoke
the concepts of statistical electromagnetics. We show that as
long as the assumptions of ergodicity and spatial uniformity
hold, one can still apply the classical radiative transfer
equation in which the participating extinction and phase
matrices are obtained by averaging the respective single-particle
matrices over all the particles constituting the cloud.
This result implies that comparisons of in situ and
remote-sensing retrievals of the cloud-particle size
distribution can be problematic and should be performed
with caution.
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