Abstract
Coupled atmosphere and ocean remote sensing retrievals of microphysical
properties made by the NASA Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem
(PACE) mission require time-consuming single-scattering computations
for the constituents. Our line of look-up tables allows us to speed up
these computations for aerosols and cloud droplets in the atmosphere,
and for coated spheres representing oceanic phytoplankton. In this
study, we tabulate the computations of the single-scattering
properties of fractal-like aggregates with a complex refractive index
of 1.95–
i
⋅ 0.96, characteristic of bare
carbonaceous soot for wavelengths from 0.35 to 2.3 µm. Our new look-up
table covers aggregates with fractal dimensions of 1.4–2.8 consisting
of 1 to 4,096 touching black carbon monomers with identical radii in
the range 0.015 to 0.025 µm. We achieve an increase of at least
10
6
in computational speed compared to direct calculations.
As an application example, we use our look-up table to reproduce the
low single-scattering albedo of
in situ
aerosol measurements acquired during the NASA ACTIVATE mission.