Modeling Rayleigh Scattering of Aerosol Particles

Rayleigh scattering of naturally polarized light was studied for systems with atmospheric relevance representing growing water clusters with adsorbed cis-pinonic acid. The scattering intensity was computed from the static and dynamical polarizabilities of the clusters obtained by a recently derived methodology for classical polarizabilities, in which Applequist equations for interacting polarizable dipoles are used together with point-dipoles and polarizabilities obtained by quantum chemistry and decomposed into the atomic domain by the so-called LoProp transformation generalized for frequency dependence. The Applequist interaction was found to yield scattering intensities 20% larger for a cluster consisting of 1000 water molecules, as compared to the method where all of the polarizabilities of molecules are added without interactions. It was confirmed that scattering intensity depends quadratically on the number of water molecules in the cluster, and that it also increases quadratically with increase in the mass constituent of the foreign substance. The adsorption of the cis-pinonic acid increases the contribution to the scattering intensity stemming from the anisotropic polarizability, as compared to the isotropic contribution. The ramifications of the method in predicting Rayleigh scattering and the earth's albedo with respect to man-made and natural gas emission are briefly discussed.