Coherent and incoherent additions of ight beams at solutions of the light scattering problem by use the beam tracing method within the framework of physical optics

Interference effects between the scattered beams in the problem of light scattering by atmospheric ice crystals have been studied. Since the crystals are much larger than the wavelength, it is shown that the interference effects can be neglected if the crystal sizes are statistically varied more than 5% of the mean size. As a result, any calculations of the optical properties of the crystals performing an averaging over crystal sizes can be effectively replaced by the procedure of the incoherent addition of the scattered beams. This procedure allows us decrease the execution time up to 100 times. © (2015) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only