Important Aspects of Light Scattering on Hollow Column Ice Particles

Cirrus clouds play a significant role in climate formation and lidar data processing. This type of cloud mainly consists of non-spherical ice particles, whose optical properties directly characterize the cloud properties. This paper primarily focuses on the technical details of researching and calculating the optical properties of hollow hexagonal column-shaped ice particles using the physical optics method. These particles are concave, and the transitions between “particle–air–particle” media have to be taken into account. The paper considers theoretical basics of a mathematical model of ice particles, choice of the most efficient calculation parameters in terms of time and resources (such as the number of iterations and orientations used in simulations), as well as calculation procedure, technical details, format of output files, and how they are interpreted. The main purpose of this paper is to find the optimal parameters for calculating the light scattering on ice particles, which is to significantly reduce the time of calculation. The instructions for postprocessing of big batches of the received data are provided. These results are valuable for the further development of the optical model of cirrus clouds and for lidar and radar data processing.