Calculations of Light Scattering Matrix of Dust Aerosols for Problems of Lidar Remote Sensing

The light scattering matrix is calculated for large dust particles with irregular shape and refractive index of 1.3116+i 0.0. The scattering matrix in the backward direction needed for lidar studies is separately discussed. In this case, the obtained results for the lidar and depolarization ratios are in good agreement with experimental data. It is shown that for randomly oriented particles the number of particle orientations needed for numerical calculations by exact methods like DDA becomes a crucial parameter. In particular, for particles with size parameters larger than 40 the number of orientations should be more than 1000.