Single and multiple scattering of ice clouds and dust aerosol: brief history and applications to remote sensing implementations and radiative transfer simulations

Ice clouds and airborne dust aerosol are two important atmospheric constituents. In particular, they play important roles in the radiation budget of the earth-atmosphere system. Atmospheric ice crystals and dust particles are almost exclusively nonspherical particles and their optical properties are substantially different from those predicted by the Lorenz-Mie theory. However, it is quite challenging to simulate the optical properties of arbitrarily shaped particles. For this reason, in the past three decades the atmospheric research community has expended a significant amount of effort to develop various methods to compute the single-scattering properties, namely the extinction cross section, single-scattering albedo, and phase matrix, of nonspherical particles. In this talk, we will briefly review the history of this specific area of research and present some examples of applying light scattering research to remote sensing implementations and radiative transfer simulations concerning ice crystals and dust particles.