Microwave radiative transfer in scattering atmosphere: Effects of complex permittivity of ice spherical crystals

This paper presents the effects of ice particle's complex permittivity uncertainties on the scattering properties and upwelling brightness temperatures of cloudy atmospheres at the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit-B (AMSU-B) channel frequencies of 89, 150 and 183 GHz. We investigated the mean deviations of ice particle's optical efficiencies and asymmetry parameters due to the uncertainties in the real and imaginary parts of its complex permittivities. We assumed that the true values of ice particle's permittivity are, respectively, within ±20% for the imaginary part and ±5% for the real part of the permittivity values given by the model of Hufford. Microwave radiative transfer calculations were performed to estimate the absolute errors of brightness temperatures due to uncertainties in ice particle's permittivities. Ice particles were taken to be spherical and their diameters were chosen in the range of 40-4000 μm. Gamma-size distribution was employed in computing volume scattering properties and the effective diameters were 70, 100 and 150 μm with an effective variance being 0.25. We found that ±20% uncertainty in the imaginary part of ice particle's permittivity resulted in only about 10% mean deviations in the absorption efficiencies at the three AMSU-B channel frequencies. However, an uncertainty of ±5% in the real part resulted in more than 15% mean deviations in both scattering and extinction efficiencies, especially significant at the frequency of 183 GHz. The absolute variations of the emerging brightness temperature from the cloudy atmosphere due to uncertainties in the permittivity were found to be more than 1 K, which is already significant compared with the sensitivities achieved with today's technology for millimeter wave radiometers.