Application of spheroid models to account for aerosol particle nonsphericity in remote sensing of desert dust

The possibility of using shape mixtures of randomly oriented spheroids for modeling desert dust aerosol light scattering is discussed. For reducing calculation time, look‐up tables were simulated for quadrature coefficients employed in the numerical integration of spheroid optical properties over size and shape. The calculations were done for 25 bins of the spheroid axis ratio ranging from ∼0.3 (flattened spheroids) to ∼3.0 (elongated spheroids) and for 41 narrow size bins covering the size parameter range from ∼0.012 to ∼625. The look‐up tables were arranged into a software package, which allows fast, accurate, and flexible modeling of scattering by randomly oriented spheroids with different size and shape…