Abstract

Black carbon (BC), normally existing as aggregates, significantly affects the Earth radiative forcing, energy balance, and climate by scattering and absorbing both solar radiation and terrestrial emission. The BC particles are usually treated as fractal aggregates with same-sized monomers. However, experimental studies show that monomer diameters of BC normally obey a lognormal distribution ranging from 10 nm to over 100 nm. This study investigates the effects of monomer size distribution on the radiative properties of BC particles. The fractal aggregates are generated by a cluster–cluster aggregation (CCA) algorithm, and the Multiple Sphere T-Matrix (MSTM) method is used to simulate the radiative properties of randomly oriented aggregates. The integral radiative properties of aggregates with different-sized monomers have normal distributions with large standard deviations, and it requires to average radiative properties of over 60 aggregate realizations to represent their ensemble-averaged properties. Th...

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