These investigations permit, from a statistical view, an examination of the general properties of the torus, i.e. inclination to our LOS, number of clouds, covering factor, optical depth of clouds, etc.
Balloon-carried hygrometers give information on the humidity of the cirrus cloud but are not accurate enough to measure the depth of the cloud.
Following insights from photon diffusion theory, we are able to infer the physical thickness and optical depth of the cloud layer, and, from there, obtain an estimate of the volume-averaged liquid water content.
A change in CE corresponds to a change in the optical depth of the Compton cloud.
Our result implies that the optical depth of the Compton cloud gradually rises as the variability class becomes harder.
Fig. 3. 68%and90%0% contour plot of the distance and optical depth of the dust cloud in the FUV for the Northern regions.
Polarimetric observations are able to characterize only the topmost optical depth of the Venus clouds.
The Pioneer Venus Orbiter Cloud PhotoPolarimeter (OCPP) (Colin and Hunten 1977) confirmed the previous ground-based polarimetric detection (Hansen and Hovenier 1974) of a population of predominantly (1mu hbox {m}), spherical droplets of sulfuric acid as being the primary constituent of the topmost optical depth of the Venus clouds.
where R and t are the rotation and translation matrix, respectively, (z^{X}_{i,j}) is the depth of the model point cloud, and (z^{Y R,t)}_{i,j}) is the depth of the data point cloud after applying the rotation and translation matrix with i,j from the ray casting process.
The optical depth of the variable component of clouds seen in images with features are up to 0.047 ± 0.009 with a granularity to the features observed which averages 3.8°.
