The polarimetric characteristics of dust with irregular shapes: evaluation of the spheroid model for single particles

In the atmosphere, the dust shapes are various, and a single model is difficult to represent the complex shapes of dust. We proposed a tunable model to represent dust with various shapes. Two tunable parameters were used to represent the effects of the erosion degree and binding forces from the mass center, respectively. Thus, the model can represent various dust shapes by adjusting the tunable parameters. To evaluate the applicability of the single spheroid model in calculating the optical properties of single dust with irregular shapes, the aspect ratios of spheroids were retrieved by best fitting the phase function of dust with irregular shapes. In this work, the optical properties and polarimetric characteristics of irregular dust with a diameter range of 0.2-2.0 mu m were investigated. Our findings show that the dust shapes have a substantial impact on the scattering matrix, and sometimes the sign of elements of the scattering matrix could be modified by changing the tunable parameters. The applicability of the spheroid model is significantly affected by the erosion degree and binding forces, and substantial deviations could be observed when the dust diameter is in the range of 0.8-2.0 mu m. The F-11 relative differences of approximately 100 % between dust with irregular shapes and best-fitted spheroids could be observed in certain scattering angles. The maximum differences in other elements between irregular dust particles and best-fitted spheroids can reach approximately 0.3-0.8. Besides, the signs of F-12/F-11, F-33/F-11, F-34/F-11 and F-44/F-11 can be modified from negative to positive at some scattering angles if substituting the irregular dust with best-fitted spheroids. As the binding force is small, the deviation of extinction or scattering cross-section generally increases with the erosion degree, and the relative differences between dust with irregular shapes and spheroids can reach approximately 30 % when the erosion degree is large, while the differences are mitigated with the binding force increasing. Besides, with the binding force increasing, the aspect ratio is closer to 1 : 1. The deviations of the spheroid model in estimating the polarized light were also investigated using the successive-order-of-scattering (SOS) vector radiative transfer (VRT) model. With a diameter (d(p)) of 0.2 mu m, the relative difference of normalized radiance does not exceed 3 %, and the absolute values of the deviation of the polarized bidirectional reflectance factor (PBRF) and the ratio of radiance to polarized intensity (DoLP) are below 0.005 and 0.02, respectively. However, with the particle size increasing, the difference becomes much more substantial. The relative difference of the normalized radiance can exceed 10 %, and the deviations of the PBRF and DoLP can vary in the ranges of -0.015 to 0.025 and -0.05 to 0.15, respectively. Thus, the single spheroid model may lead to non-negligible deviations for estimating the polarimetric characteristics of single dust particles with more complex shapes. In this work, only the optical properties of single particles were considered. In the future, the applicability of an ensemble of spheroidal particles for reproducing the scattering properties and polarimetric characteristics of an ensemble of irregularly shaped dust particles should be further investigated.