Abstract
Abstract
SPARCLE is an optical particle counter (OPC) designed to measure particle size and refractive index in the size range between 500 nm and 2500 nm. The knowledge of the parameters is essential for understanding the aerosol impact on the Earth's radiative forcing. There are other instruments which try to measure the parameters simultaneously, however, those instruments need either ad hoc scaling factors or further manipulation to their outputs to retrieve the parameters. In contrast to those instruments, no manipulation is needed in retrieving the parameters from SPARCLE outputs. SPARCLE measurements suffer a bias due to various factors. In this paper, those factors are evaluated and the impact of the bias on simulated SPARCLE measurements is demonstrated. The results indicate that the bias introduces additional structures to measured size distribution.