Light Backscattering by Ice Crystals of Cirrus Clouds Within the Physical Optics Approximation

Lidar technologies are widely used for retrieving microphysics of cirrus clouds, i.e. sizes, shapes and spatial orientation of ice crystals constituting the clouds. Interpretation of the lidar signals are based on the backscattered light. However, properties of the light backscattered by the ice crystals have not been well known and understood yet. The reason of this is that the problem of light scattering by the ice crystals much larger that incident wavelengths has not been solved satisfactorily yet because of great demands to computer resources. In this contribution we review the physical optics approximation as a prospective method to solve the light scattering problem on large nonspherical particles in lidar application.