Quantifying the effects of mixing state on aerosol optical properties

The model representation of aerosol mixing state potentially introduces large uncertainties into these calculations, since the simulated aerosol optical properties are sensitive to mixing state. In this study, we systematically quantified the impact of aerosol mixing state on aerosol optical properties using an ensemble of 1800 aerosol populations from particle-resolved simulations as a basis for Mie calculations for optical properties.

Assuming the aerosol to be internally mixed within prescribed size bins caused overestimations of aerosol absorptivity and underestimations of aerosol scattering. Together, these led to errors in the populations' single scattering albedo of up to -22.3 % with a median of -0.9 %. The mixing state metric chi proved useful in relating errors in the volume absorption coefficient, the volume scattering coefficient and the single scattering albedo to the degree of internally mixing of the aerosol, with larger errors being associated with more external mixtures.