Nighttime Atmospheric Scattering Phase Function Derived From the Scattered Light of a Laser Beam

Abstract

AbstractContinuous monitoring of the atmospheric scattering phase function is difficult to perform since most observational techniques are limited to daylight hours. Among known aerosol optical properties, only atmospheric optical depth is measured routinely during clear nights at a few ground stations. In this paper we develop theoretical and experimental techniques to retrieve the scattering phase function from radiometry of a laser beam whose light is scattered in the lower nocturnal atmosphere. The field experiment we conducted in a night environment demonstrates the capability of the method to determine in real‐world settings. We show that extracting the scattering phase function from radiance data is realizable over a wide range of angles, which makes possible the use of an analytical extrapolation to approximate across the full range of scattering angles.