Classification of Ice Crystal Habits Observed From Airborne Cloud Particle Imager by Deep Transfer Learning

Abstract Ice clouds are mostly composed of different ice crystal habits. It is of great importance to classify ice crystal habits seeing as they could greatly impact single‐scattering properties of ice crystal particles. The single‐scattering properties play an important role in the study of cloud remote sensing and the Earth's atmospheric radiation budget. However, there are countless ice crystals with different shapes in ice clouds, and the task of empirical classification based on naked‐eye observations is unreliable, time consuming and subjective, which leads to classification results having obvious uncertainties and biases. In this paper, the images of ice crystals observed from airborne Cloud Particle Imager in China are used to establish an ice crystal data set called Ice Crystals Database…