<title>Inverse scattering problem for mixed-phase and cirrus clouds</title>

Abstract

A new method of particle size retrieval is proposed of rice crystal and mixed phase clouds. The method enables us to identify each component of a bi-component cloud composed namely of ice crystals and water droplets and to retrieve separately size distributions of each cloud component. Its capability is explored as usually by using 'synthetic' multi-angular data of scattered light intensity. Various cloud microphysical characteristics are modeled by assuming two non-interacting cloud components such as liquid or supercooled droplets and cubic or hexagonal ice crystals with regular simple geometrical shapes as a first approximation. The sensitivity of the method is tested for different relative concentrations of the cloud components varying over a wide range. Firstly, we investigate the applicability limits of the single-component cloud approximation in retrieving particle size distributions of a bi-component cloud. Secondly, we test the method to retrieve simultaneously the size distributions of both the components in mixed-phase clouds, and discuss the conditions of its applicability.