https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/s10053-023-00694-6
Regular Article – Optical Phenomena and Photonics
Laser light propagation in a turbid medium: solution including multiple scattering effects
1
Department of Physics, Stevens Institute of Technology, 1 Castle Point on Hudson, 07030, Hoboken, NJ, USA
2
Langley Research Center, NASA, Hampton, VA, USA
3
Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC), University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
4
Department of Physics, University of Bergen, Bergen, Hordaland, Norway
5
Ball Aerospace, Boulder, CO, USA
6
Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Science, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
Received:
29
December
2022
Accepted:
30
May
2023
Published online:
19
June
2023
We have shown that solutions to the radiative transfer equation for a homogeneous slab yield a zenith radiance reflectance that for collimated beam incidence in the nadir direction can be expressed in terms of the lidar ratio, defined as the extinction coefficient divided by the 180
backscattering coefficient. The recently developed QlblC method, which allows one to quantify layer-by-layer contributions to radiances emerging from a slab illuminated with a collimated beam of radiation, was used to show explicitly that in the single-scattering approximation the attenuated backscatter coefficient estimated by the new QlblC method gives the same result as the lidar equation. Originally developed for the continuous wave (CW) lidar problem, we have extended the new QlblC method to apply to the pulsed lidar problem. A specific example is provided to illustrate the challenge encountered for ocean property retrievals from space observations due to the fact that a very significant fraction of the signal is due to aerosol scattering/absorption; typically only about 10% (or less) comes from the ocean.
Wei Li, Snorre Stamnes, Yong Hu,Yingzhen Zhou, Nan Chen,Yongzhen Fan, Børge Hamre, Xiaomei Lu, Yuping Huang, Carl Weimer, Jennifer Lee, Xubin Zeng and Jakob Stamnes have contributed equally to this work.
© The Author(s) 2023
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