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Simultaneous observation of a glory and in-situ microphysical cloud properties

Mahen Konwar, Philip Laven, and T. V. Prabha

Open Access Open Access

Abstract

While making airborne measurements of cloud particles, a bright glory was observed on a thin layer cloud. By deliberately flying through this glory-producing cloud on several occasions, cloud particle size distributions were obtained. We found that warm liquid clouds with narrow cloud droplet size distributions are responsible for producing the observed glory. This paper presents these results and compares the results of Mie theory simulations with an image of the glory.

© 2017 Optical Society of America

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Figures (5)
Fig. 1.
Fig. 1. Photographs of the thin dark layer cloud where the glory phenomena were observed.

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Fig. 2.
Fig. 2. (a) Altitude and temperature of the aircraft observation of clouds on 28 October 2014. Glory phenomenon was observed formed by these thin layer clouds. (b) Variations of total droplet concentrations ( N c , cm − 3 ), mean diameter ( D m , μm), liquid water content (LWC, gm − 3 ), and spectral width ( σ ) of the droplet spectra. DSDs used to simulate the glory phenomenon were of the first few seconds of cloud pass. (Shown by an ellipse.)

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Fig. 3.
Fig. 3. Typical cloud droplet size distribution of glory-producing cloud (shown as glory cloud), convective cloud, and stratus cloud as observed from aircraft observation at 2 Hz resolution. DSD parameters, e.g., N c , D m , σ , and LWC are provided for each distribution.

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Fig. 4.
Fig. 4. Simulations of single scattering of sunlight using the measured DSDs shown in Fig. 2 for (a) the convective cloud, (b) the stratus cloud, and (c) the glory-producing cloud.

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Fig. 5.
Fig. 5. Glory phenomenon observed on 28 October 2014 near Mahabaleswar, India. Contrast of the colored rings are enhanced. The simulated rings are superimposed on the observed glory rings. The Mie scattering simulation is based on the measured droplet size distribution shown in Fig. 3 for the glory-producing cloud.

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