Meteorological optics

The Journal of the Optical Society of America for August 1979 is almost entirely devoted to meteorological optics it contains several papers on rainbows, the glory, and ice crystal phenomena. 

Tricker, R. A. R., 1970. Introduction to Meteorological Optics, Elsevier, New York. 

The meteorological conditions during PAUR II were favourable for the study of the background atmospheric composition in the region. N/NE and W/NW flow was alternated with SW flow that transported air from the Sahara. Hence, the chemical, physical and optical characteristics of the background Eastern Mediterranean atmosphere were studied for the first time for a variety of synoptic flows. 

The monthly mean ozone from the Dobson time series (1957-1986) of Vigna di Valle (50 km apart from Rome) and from TOMS (Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer) satellite data (1979-1991) version 6 are assumed as climatological frames of reference for Rome and Ispra, respectively. Aerosol optical depths at 550 nm are estimated by means of sunphotometry. Data from the two meteorological stations of Rome and Milan airports are used to describe the atmospheric conditions. Standard vertical profiles of pressure, temperature, relative humidity and ozone density are selected. 

The term Qsh is the net solar radiant energy absorption rate on the basin bottom. It is equivalent to total radiation incident on the basin cover minus reflection from the cover, the water surface, and the basin bottom, and minus loss due to structural shadowing. Its determination from Weather Bureau records of total daily radiation on a horizontal surface is complicated by many factors such as variation in angle of incidence, and resulting transmissivity of cover, hourly and seasonally, intensity change due to cloudiness, and different properties of direct and diffuse radiations. Detailed explanation of these meteorological and optical calculations is beyond the scope of this paper, but may be found in the literature (6). 

The meteorological fields are supplied by the limited area model ALADIN-Austria (http //www.cnrm.meteo.fr/aladin/). It is run twice a day at the ZAMG and renders forecasts for 48 h. The meteorological fields have a temporal resolution of 1 h. The data is provided on 45 levels, and model has a horizontal resolution of 9.6 km. Fields of wind, temperatiue, pressure, convective and large scale precipitation, snow cover, solar radiation and specific humidity are extracted directly from the ALADIN dataset. The other fields, cloud optical depth, cloud water- and precipitation water content have to be parameterised (Seinfeld and Pandis 1998) from the ALADIN output. 

Figure 28.28 Correlation of (a) the particle extinction coefficient at 308 nm, (b) the back-scatter coefficient at 308 nm, (c) the extinction-to-back-scatter DIAL ratio, (d) the effective radius of the particle size distribution, (e) the particle surface-area and (f) the mass concentrations the data were recorded on 4 April 1992. The lidar signal profiles are smoothed with a height window of 600 m for the back-scatter coefficient and 2500 m in all other cases the error bars indicate the overall retrieval error. The optical depth of the stratospheric aerosol layer was 0.25. The dashed line indicates the tropopause. Adapted from Ansmann et al, J. Atmos. Sci., 1997, 54 2630, with permission ofthe American Meteorological Society...

Quantum Optics. Quantum optics is a division of physics that comes from the application of mathematical models of quantum mechanics to the dual wave and particle nature of light. This area of optics has applications in meteorology, telecommunications, and other industries. 

---