Multi-view polarimetric scattering cloud tomography and retrieval of droplet size

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel 3D polarimetric tomography method to retrieve cloud droplet size distributions and concentrations using multi-view remote sensing, surpassing traditional 1D models for better cloud microphysics understanding.

Contribution

It develops a full 3D cloud droplet tomography framework using polarized radiative transfer and a two-step optimization, enabling detailed microphysical property retrieval.

Findings

Successfully demonstrated with synthetic clouds

Provides uncertainty quantification for the retrievals

Advances cloud microphysics analysis beyond current methods

Abstract

Tomography aims to recover a three-dimensional (3D) density map of a medium or an object. In medical imaging, it is extensively used for diagnostics via X-ray computed tomography (CT). Optical diffusion tomography is an alternative to X-ray CT that uses multiply scattered light to deliver coarse density maps for soft tissues. We define and derive tomography of cloud droplet distributions via passive remote sensing. We use multi-view polarimetric images to fit a 3D polarized radiative transfer (RT) forward model. Our motivation is 3D volumetric probing of vertically-developed convectively-driven clouds that are ill-served by current methods in operational passive remote sensing. These techniques are based on strictly 1D RT modeling and applied to a single cloudy pixel, where cloud geometry is assumed to be that of a plane-parallel slab. Incident unpolarized sunlight, once scattered by cloud-droplets, changes its polarization state according to droplet size. Therefore, polarimetric measurements in the rainbow and glory angular regions can be used to infer the droplet size distribution. This work defines and derives a framework for a full 3D tomography of cloud droplets for both their mass concentration in space and their distribution across a range of sizes. This 3D retrieval of key microphysical properties is made tractable by our novel approach that involves a restructuring and differentiation of an open-source polarized 3D RT code to accommodate a special two-step optimization technique. Physically-realistic synthetic clouds are used to demonstrate the methodology with rigorous uncertainty quantification.