The purpose of this section is to assess the effects of different aerosol properties on limb radiance and polarization, independent of their optical depth. Variation in any of the size parameters will result in a change in the extinction cross-section and hence optical depth. Since the effects of optical thickness of the aerosol on radiance and polarization were addressed previously, for comparisons made in this section aerosol number densities have been scaled such that they give the same optical depth at a given wavelength. In other words, the effect of varying the elements of the phase matrix alone are determined.
The parameters investigated are the functional form of the size distribution, the effective radius and the effective variance.