Abstract

With the expanding use of electro-optical devices in both military and civilian areas, an understanding of the scattering of light by snow crystals is needed to assess the performance of electro-optical systems in blowing and falling snow. Since the orientation of the snow crystals as well as their size and shape must be considered when calculating scattering, the phase functions of various types of snow crystals are needed in order to compute the transmission through a snowy atmosphere. The snow crystal phase functions are also of importance in problems involving radiative transfer in cloud atmospheres, since high altitude clouds consist mainly of ice crystals.