Credit: Image courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory
A sparse set of weighted particle (stems) accurately and efficiently represents realistically complex aerosol distributions simulated by a detailed particle-resolved model (number density distributions). Number density distributions with respect to particles’ dry diameter and hygroscopicity parameter are a projection of the 20-dimensional aerosol mixing state distribution, sampled at three time steps from the particle-resolved model PartMC-MOSAIC. The particle-resolved model requires simulation of 10,000 to 100,000 particles; the new sparse-particle framework represents cloud condensation nuclei activation of these complex distributions using only 8 particles.