On the aerosol and cloud phase function expansion moments for radiative transfer simulations

Abstract The accuracy of the Henyey‐Greenstein (HG) approximation in radiative transfer process is systematically investigated for aerosol and cloud particles. For small‐size aerosols, the phase function moment by the HG approximation is close to that of the true phase function; therefore, the differences in four‐stream radiative transfer calculations are very small whether using the HG approximation or the true phase function moments. …