RELIABILITY OF THE THEORETICAL DESCRIPTION OF ELECTROMAGNETIC SCATTERING FROM NONSPHERICAL PARTICLES

Most common aerosols are composed either of irregularly-shaped particles, or of spherical particles that may undergo aggregation phenomena which in turn give rise to effectively non isotropic compound scatterers. It is therefore not surprising that the interpretation of the optical behaviour of aerosols based on the well known Mie theory are often unsatisfactory. We devised a method suitable for studying the scattering of electromagnetic waves from a cluster of spherical scatterers of known geometry. Our purpose was to account for the effect of the anisotropy of the scattering particles without undue computational effort and to determine to what extent an irregularly-shaped particle could be approximated by a simpler system.