Aerosols

For: users reading aerosol inputs and developers stabilizing aerosol scheme support.

Next: Configure a Scene, Mie & Rayleigh (Concepts), Library.

The Aerosols module is a user-facing framework for aerosol input data, refractive-index lookup tables, and scheme-specific optical-property preparation. This API is still being stabilized after the sanghavi-unified merge, so treat it as available but more likely to evolve than the CoreRT, Absorption, and Scattering APIs.

Supported Schemes

Scheme	Type	Input style	Use case
TOMAS-15	TOMAS15Scheme	Size-resolved concentrations in 15 logarithmic diameter bins	Microphysics-aware aerosol columns
Two-moment	TwoMomentScheme	AOD, effective radius, and fixed geometric width per species	Compact aerosol-state inputs from chemistry or retrieval systems

Both schemes are configured from YAML and read from NetCDF through read_aerosol_data. The returned AerosolData stores the scheme, species data, coordinates, and NetCDF metadata.

Refractive Indices

The refractive-index database is separate from the aerosol state:

using vSmartMOM

db = vSmartMOM.Aerosols.load_refractive_index_database("refractive_indices.yaml")
n = vSmartMOM.Aerosols.get_refractive_index(db, "sulfate_suso", 0.55)

Wavelengths are in micrometers. get_refractive_index interpolates the real and imaginary parts linearly and returns a complex refractive index.

Relationship To Scattering

Aerosols handles data ingestion and scheme organization. The lower-level Mie and Greek-coefficient calculations are explained in Mie & Rayleigh (Concepts). In a complete workflow, aerosol input data are converted into optical properties that the CoreRT layer assembly can consume.

Current Caveats

• The module is public but still WIP; names and configuration details may be cleaned up before registration.

• TOMAS-15 and two-moment support are present; additional schemes should be added through new AerosolScheme subtypes rather than one large parser branch.

• Heavy NetCDF fixtures are not part of the unit-test path.

Useful APIs

• AerosolScheme, TOMAS15Scheme, TwoMomentScheme

• AerosolData, AerosolSpeciesData

• RefractiveIndexDatabase, RefractiveIndexLUT

• read_aerosol_data, load_refractive_index_database, get_refractive_index

• list_species, wavelength_range