Skip to main content
Have a personal or library account? Click to login
Modelling lidar-relevant optical properties of complex mineral dust aerosols Cover

Modelling lidar-relevant optical properties of complex mineral dust aerosols

Open Access
|Jan 2011

Abstract

We model lidar-relevant optical properties of mineral dust aerosols and compare the modelling results with optical properties derived from lidar measurements during the SAMUM field campaigns. The Discrete Dipole Approximation is used for optical modelling of single particles. For modelling of ensemble properties, the desert aerosol type of the OPAC aerosol dataset is extended by mixtures of absorbing and non-absorbing irregularly shaped mineral dust particles. Absorbing and non-absorbing particles are mixed to mimic the natural mineralogical inhomogeneity of dust particles. A sensitivity study reveals that the mineralogical inhomogeneity is critical for the lidar ratio at short wavelengths; it has to be considered for agreement with the observed wavelength dependence of the lidar ratio. The amount of particles with low aspect ratios (about 1.4 and lower) affects the lidar ratio at any lidar wavelength; their amount has to be low for agreement with SAMUM observations. Irregularly shaped dust particles with typical refractive indices, in general, have higher linear depolarization ratios than corresponding spheroids, and improve the agreement with the observations.

Language: English
Page range: 725 - 741
Submitted on: Nov 23, 2010
Accepted on: May 25, 2011
Published on: Jan 1, 2011
Published by: Stockholm University Press
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services

© 2011 Josef Gasteiger, Matthias Wiegner, Silke Groß, Volker Freudenthaler, Carlos Toledano, Matthias Tesche, Konrad Kandler, published by Stockholm University Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.