Nonsphericity of dust‐like tropospheric aerosols: Implications for aerosol remote sensing and climate modeling

The nonsphericity of dust‐like tropospheric aerosols causes us to question the applicability of using conventional Mie theory to compute their radiative properties. In this paper we compare T‐matrix computations of light scattering by polydispersions of randomly oriented nonspherical aerosols and Mie computations for equivalent spheres. We demonstrate that even moderate nonsphericity results in substantial errors in the retrieved aerosol optical thickness if satellite reflectance measurements are analyzed using Mie theory. On the other hand, the use of Mie theory for nonspherical aerosols produces negligible errors in the computation of albedo and flux related quantities, provided that the aerosol size distribution and optical thickness are known beforehand. The first result can be explained by large nonspherical‐spherical differences in scattering phase function, while the second result follows from small nonspherical‐spherical differences in single‐scattering albedo and asymmetry parameter. Our results demonstrate that no cancellation of errors occurs if one consistently uses Mie theory in the retrieval algorithm and then in computing the albedo for the retrieved aerosol optical thickness.