Abstract
A method for evaluating the intensity, degree of polarization, direction of polarization, and ellipticity of the scattered radiation emerging from a plane-parallel atmosphere containing large spherical particles is described. In this method, all the elements of the normalized phase matrix are represented by fourier series whose maximum required number of terms depend upon the zenith angles of the directions of the incident and scattered radiation. Some results are presented for an atmospheric model containing water spheres with size parameter 10.0 to show that this method can be used to evaluate reliably all the characteristics of the emergent radiation in a reasonable amount of computer time.