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16 - Numerical computations and laboratory measurements of electromagnetic scattering

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2014

Michael I. Mishchenko
Affiliation:
NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center
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Summary

Solving the energy-budget and optical characterization problems formulated in Section 1.4 relies on one's ability to:

  1. • compute the time-averaged Poynting vector and/or

  2. • model theoretically the net signal recorded by a (polarimetric) WCR.

To accomplish either task one usually needs a direct computer solver of the MMEs. This solver may be required, for example, to calculate the spatial distribution of the Poynting vector inside a densely packed particulate medium, or to compute the extinction and phase matrices needed to analyze the reading of a far-field WCR.

Depending on the complexity and size of the scattering object (cf. Plate 1.1), direct computer solvers of the MMEs can become inefficient and may need to be replaced with a well-characterized and manageable approximate solution. For example, we will see in Chapter 19 that certain observable manifestations of scattering by a large random group of sparsely distributed particles, as well as its electromagnetic energy budget can be quantified by solving the so-called radiative transfer equation. However, two key quantities entering this equation, the single-particle extinction and phase matrices averaged over all particle micro-physical states ξ, must still be calculated by using a numerical solver of the MMEs. We have seen that the same is true of the FOSA derived in Chapter 14 for a small group of randomly and sparsely distributed particles observed from a sufficiently large distance.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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