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In recent years, it has become clear that a substantial fraction oftransiting exoplanets have some form of aerosol present in their atmospheres.Transit spectroscopy - mostly of hot Jupiters, but also of some smaller planets- has provided evidence for this, in the form of steep downward slopes fromblue to red in the optical part of the spectrum, and muted gas absorptionfeatures throughout. Retrieval studies seeking to constrain the composition ofexoplanet atmospheres must therefore account for the presence of aerosols.However, clouds and hazes are complex physical phenomena, and the transitspectra that are currently available allow us to constrain only some of theirproperties. Therefore, representation of aerosols in retrieval models requiresthat they are described by only a few parameters, and this has been done in avariety of ways within the literature. Here, I investigate a range ofparameterisations for exoplanet aerosol and their effects on retrievals fromtransmission spectra of hot Jupiters HD 189733b and HD 209458b. I find thatresults qualitatively agree for the cloud/haze itself regardless of theparameterisation used, and indeed using multiple approaches provides a moreholistic picture; the retrieved abundance of H2O is also very robust toassumptions about aerosols. I also find strong evidence that aerosol on HD209458b covers less than half of the terminator region, whilst the picture isless clear for HD 189733b.

Unveiling cloudy exoplanets: the influence of cloud model choices on retrieval solutions