Infrared optical constants of aqueous sulfate-nitrate-ammonium multi-component tropospheric aerosols from attenuated total reflectance measurements: Part II. An examination of mixing rules

We examine the performance of several mixing rules that are commonly used in modeling optical constants of aerosol mixtures either in remote sensing or radiation transfer/climate studies employing the new refractive index data reported in Part I. We demonstrate that the optical constants of the considered mixtures are not accurately modeled using pure solute optical constants (e.g., ammonium sulfate optical constants and the optical constants of pure water) due to the complex ion-ion and ion-water interactions. On the other hand, we do find that ternary and quaternary mixtures can be well modeled by applying the mixing rules to lower order multi-component optical constants data, e.g., binary data to determine ternary optical constants, or binary and ternary data to determine quaternary optical constants. By using lower order optical constants data sets, much of the ion-ion and ion-water effects are captured. Both mass-fraction and volume-fraction weighting of the “component” optical constants yield satisfactory results, performing as well or better than the more complicated mixing rules. These findings will be of practical use in remote sensing and radiation transfer/climate studies as well as help guide the decision on what optical constants measurements will be required.