Articles | Volume 13, issue 3
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-1071-2020
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-1071-2020
Research article
 | 
06 Mar 2020
Research article |  | 06 Mar 2020

A comparison of lognormal and gamma size distributions for characterizing the stratospheric aerosol phase function from optical particle counter measurements

Ernest Nyaku, Robert Loughman, Pawan K. Bhartia, Terry Deshler, Zhong Chen, and Peter R. Colarco

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Short summary
This paper shows the importance of the nature of the aerosol phase function used in the retrieval of the stratospheric aerosol extinction from limb scattering measurements. The aerosol phase function is derived from the parameters using either a unimodal lognormal or gamma aerosol size distribution. These two distributions were fitted to the same aerosol concentration measurements at two altitudes, and depending on the nature of the measurements, each distribution shows its strengths.