Investigations of the corner-reflection effect at soundings of cirrus clouds by a scanning lidar

Abstract

Corner-reflection effect is the main feature at lidar soundings of cirrus clouds. In this paper, this effect is numerically studied in the case of plate-like quasi-horizontally oriented ice crystals of cirrus clouds. It is shown that the lidar signal as function of lidar tilt relative to the vertical can be used for inferring microphysical properties of ice crystals. In particular, if depolarization ratio at small lidar tilts is a small quantity it means that the crystals are plate-like and the plates are quasi-horizontally oriented. Appearance of a sharp step of depolarization ratio at the tilts of about 30° means that the transversal shapes of the crystals are regular. Otherwise, the transversal shapes are irregular.