• Current Optics and Photonics
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.174-185
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• 2020

Multiscattering occurs when a laser transmits into dense atmosphere targets (e.g. fogs, smoke or clouds), which can cause depolarization effects even though the scattering particles are spherical. In addition, multiscattering effects have additional information about microphysical properties of scatterers. Thus, multiscattering can be utilized to study the microphysical properties of the liquid water cloud. In this paper, a Monte Carlo method was used to simulate multi-scattering transmission properties of Lidar signals in the cloud. The results showed the slope of the degree of linear polarization (SLDLP) can be used to invert the extinction coefficient, and then the cloud effective size (CES) and the liquid water content (LWC) may be easily obtained by using the extinction coefficient and saturation of the degree of linear polarization (SADLP). Based on calculation results, a microphysical properties inversion method for a liquid cloud was presented. An innovative multiscattering polarization Lidar (MSPL) system was constructed to measure the LWC and CES of the liquid cloud, and a new method based on the polarization splitting ratio of the Polarization Beam Splitter (PBS) was developed to calibrate the polarization channels of MSPL. By analyzing the typical observation data of MSPL observation in the northern suburbs of Nanjing, China, the LWC and CES of the liquid water cloud were obtained. Comparisons between the results from the MSPL, MODIS and the Microwave radar data showed that, the microphysical properties of liquid cloud could be retrieved by combining our MSPL and the inversion method.