Scattering properties of horizontally oriented ice crystal columns in cirrus clouds Part 1

A ray tracing technique is presented based on the fundamental laws of ray and wave optics; it has been used to calculate the scattering properties of hexagonal ice crystals. These crystals were assumed to be oriented preferably horizontal, and, therefore, the resulting phase functions have been plotted vs direction in 3-D space contrary to earlier calculations of other authors. The anisotropy of the scattered radiation is clearly shown; on the average the phase function varies over ~2 orders of magnitude. From these single scattering results the multiple scattering between various ice crystals has also been calculated.