Abstract

The optical effects of a cloud of scatterers depend on the extinction, scattering, and absorption coefficients per unit volume in the cloud. Determining these coefficients in terms of the particle-size distribution is tedious, does not yield an intuitive understanding of how the optical effects will change when the cloud changes, and requires detailed data that are usually not available. Whenever possible, modelers therefore prefer to express the optical coefficients in terms of bulk properties, such as the condensed water content, the number density of scatterers, or optical coefficients at other wavelengths. A new method has yielded a comprehensive way of determining when such reduced expressions are possible, as well as the number of bulk properties needed as independent variables, and which bulk properties are best to use.

© 1985 Optical Society of America