Surface illuminance and albedo of a planetary atmosphere with nearly conservative scattering.

A plane homogeneous atmosphere of arbitrary optical thickness is studied during anisotropic scattering. It is shown that, during nearly conservative scattering, the plane albedo and the surface illuminance can be expressed by two functions in the conservative case. An additional function is needed for calculating the total amount of radiant energy absorbed by the column of the atmosphere of unit section. Tables of these functions are presented for two types of scattering indicatrixes for a wide range of values of the optical thickness of the atmosphere.