Specify mass density profiles of a mixture of aerosol types.  

aerosol_species_file profile [aero_1 aero_2 ... aero_n]

 
where aero_1 to aero_n are the aerosol species to be included. For each of these species, the optical properties are read from the aerosol_species_library, e.g. the OPAC data set provided with libRadtran. The profile file needs to include vertical profiles for each of these species. This file can be either in netCDF-format (automatically recognized filename extension .nc or .cdf) or in ASCII format. The format of the ASCII file is:  

z1 dens(aero_1, z1) dens(aero_2, z1) ... dens(aero_n, z1)
z2 dens(aero_1, z2) dens(aero_2, z2) ...
. . .
. . .

 
where z is the height in km, and dens are the aerosol mass densities in g/m3. Please make sure to include one column for each of the species aero_1 to aero_n listed after aerosol_species_file. For netCDF input it is also possible to specify the unit 'kg kg{}^{{-1}}'; the data are then automatically converted to g/m{}^{3}.

Some default aerosol mixtures are provided, corresponding to the definitions in hess98:_optic_proper_aeros_cloud. They can simply be invoked by  

aerosol_species_file mixture_name

 
where mixture_name can be one of the following:  

continental_clean
continental_average
continental_polluted
urban
maritime_clean
maritime_polluted
maritime_tropical
desert
antarctic

 
A variation of the desert mixture containing nonspherical particles is  

desert_spheroids