The effects of morphological structure, water coating, dust mixing and primary particle size distribution on the radiative properties of soot fractal aggregates in atmosphere are investigated using T-matrix method. These fractal aggregates are numerically generated using a combination of the particle–cluster and cluster–cluster aggregation algorithms with fractal parameters representing soot aggregate in atmosphere. The radiative properties of compact aggregate notably deviate from that of the branched one, and the effect of morphology changes on the radiative properties in wet air cannot be neglected. However it is reasonable to use realization-averaged radiative properties to represent that of the aggregates with certain morphology. In wet air, the scattering, absorption and extinction cross-section and symmetry parameter of soot aggregates coated with water notably increase with water shell thickness. The mixing structures of dust have little effect on radiative properties of aggregates, but the volume fraction of dust has an obvious effect on extinction, scattering and absorption cross-section of aggregates when the size parameters are above the Rayleigh limit. Although the primary particle size distribution of soot aggregate has mild effect on the scattering albedo and asymmetry parameter, the deviations of the extinction, scattering, absorption cross-section among the three size distributions are significant in this study. The size distribution has a significant effect on forward scattering of phase function, while the effect can be neglected as the size parameter approaches to the Rayleigh limit.