PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

Si-Chee Tsay

Publications and source records attributed to Si-Chee Tsay.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Geometrical-optics solution to light scattering by droxtal ice crystals.

We investigate the phase matrices of droxtals at wavelengths of 0.66 and 11 microm by using an improved geometrical-optics method. An efficient method is developed to specify the incident rays and the corresponding impinging points on the particle surface necessary to initialize the ray-tracing computations. At the 0.66-microm wavelength, the optical properties of droxtals are different from those of hexagonal ice crystals. At the 11-microm wavelength, the phase functions for droxtals are essentially featureless because of strong absorption within the particles, except for ripple structures that are caused by the phase interference of the diffracted wave.

Journal Article↗

Surface aerosol radiative forcing derived from collocated ground-based radiometric observations during PRIDE, SAFARI, and ACE-Asia.

An approach is presented to estimate the surface aerosol radiative forcing by use of collocated cloud-screened narrowband spectral and thermal-offset-corrected radiometric observations during the Puerto Rico Dust Experiment 2000, South African Fire Atmosphere Research Initiative (SAFARI) 2000, and Aerosol Characterization Experiment-Asia 2001. We show that aerosol optical depths from the Multiple-Filter Rotating Shadowband Radiometer data match closely with those from the Cimel sunphotometer data for two SAFARI-2000 dates. The observed aerosol radiative forcings were interpreted on the basis of results from the Fu-Liou radiative transfer model, and, in some cases, cross checked with satellite-derived forcing parameters. Values of the aerosol radiative forcing and forcing efficiency, which quantifies the sensitivity of the surface fluxes to the aerosol optical depth, were generated on the basis of a differential technique for all three campaigns, and their scientific significance is discussed.

Journal Article↗

Inherent and apparent scattering properties of coated or uncoated spheres embedded in an absorbing host medium.

The conventional Lorenz-Mie formalism is extended to the case for a coated sphere embedded in an absorbing medium. The apparent and inherent scattering cross sections of a particle, derived from the far field and near field, respectively, are different if the host medium is absorptive. The effect of absorption within the host medium on the phase-matrix elements associated with polarization depends on the dielectric properties of the scattering particle. For the specific cases of a soot particle coated with a water layer and an ice sphere containing an air bubble, the phase-matrix elements -P12/P11 and P33/P11 are unique if the shell is thin. The radiative transfer equation for a multidisperse particle system embedded within an absorbing medium is discussed. Conventional multiple-scattering computational algorithms can be applied if scaled apparent single-scattering properties are applied.

Journal Article↗

Piffalls in atmospheric correction of ocean color imagery: how should aerosol optical properties be computed?

Current methods for the atmospheric correction of ocean-color imagery rely on the computation of optical properties of a mixture of chemically different aerosol particles through combination of the mixture with it into an effective, single-particle component that has an average refractive index. However, a multi-component approach in which each particle type independently grows and changes its refractive index with increasing humidity is more realistic. Computations based on Mie theory and radiative transfer are used to show that the two approaches result in top-of-the-atmosphere radiances that differ more than the water-leaving radiance. Thus, proper atmospheric correction requires a multicomponent approach for the computation of realistic aerosol optical properties.

Journal Article↗