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Optical properties of atmospheric aerosols from moments of the particle size distribution
Author(s) -
McGraw Robert,
Huang Peter I.,
Schwartz Stephen E.
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/95gl02472
Subject(s) - aerosol , parametrization (atmospheric modeling) , moment (physics) , nucleation , method of moments (probability theory) , statistical physics , particle size distribution , computational physics , physics , quadrature (astronomy) , particle size , classical mechanics , mathematics , optics , meteorology , statistics , chemistry , thermodynamics , radiative transfer , estimator
The method of moments is a powerful tool for directly calculating the lower‐order moments of an aerosol size distribution without full knowledge of the distribution itself. These moments can be tracked in space and time to represent the effects of nucleation, evaporation and growth, coagulation, and complex flowfield dynamics. This letter applies quadrature methods for efficient estimation of aerosol optical properties directly from a known moment sequence. The approach is demonstrated using particle size distributions obtained from fits to field measurements. Comparison of light‐scattering phase functions and other integral optical properties calculated from the moments with those obtained from the full distributions shows that the lower‐order moments lead to an efficient and accurate parametrization for these properties.