Optical modeling of mineral dust particles: A review

Dust particles are uniquely and irregularly shaped, they can be inhomogeneous, form agglomerates, be composed of anisotropic materials, and have a preferred orientation. As such, modeling their light scattering is very challenging. This review takes a look at the advances in dust optical modeling over the last decade. It is obvious that our ability to model the single-scattering properties of dust particles accurately depends on the size parameter. Unfortunately, our ability to account realistically for all the relevant physical properties in light-scattering modeling is the best for small particles; whereas, the realistic treatment of the particles would be most important for large size parameters. When particles are not much larger than the wavelength, even simple model shapes such as homogeneous spheroids appear to perform well; practically any reasonable shape distribution of non-spherical model particles seems superior compared to the Mie theory. Our ability to model scattering by dust particles much larger than the wavelength is very limited: no method presently exists to predict reliably and accurately the single-scattering properties of such particles, although there are models that can be tuned to agree well with the laboratory-measured reference scattering matrices. The intermediate size parameters between the resonance domain and the geometric-optics domain appear to be almost uncharted territory and, consequently, very little can be said about the impact of different physical properties on scattering in this region. Despite the challenges, the use of Mie theory should be avoided: contrary to the popular belief, the use of Mie spheres is a major source of error even in radiation-budget considerations.