The spatial polarization distribution over the dome of the sky for abnormal irradiance of the atmosphere

The paper deals with the polarized radiative transfer within a slab irradiated by a collimated infinitely wide beam of arbitrary polarized light. The efficiency of the proposed analytical solution lies in the assumption that the complete vectorial radiative transfer solution is the superposition of the most anisotropic and smooth parts, computed separately. The vectorial small-angle modification of the spherical harmonics method is used to evaluate the anisotropic part, and the vectorial discrete ordinates method is used to obtain the smooth one. The azimuthal expansion is used in order to describe the light field spatial distribution for the case of abnormal irradiance and to obtain some known neutral points in the sky especially useful for polarized remote sensing of the atmosphere. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.