Atmospheric aerosols, suspensions of solid or liquid particles, are an important multi-phase system. Aerosols scatter and absorb shortwave (solar) radiation, affecting climate (Charlson et al., 1992; Schwartz, 1996) and visibility; nucleate cloud droplet formation, modifying the reflectivity of clouds (Twomey et al., 1984; Schwartz and Slingo, 1996) as well as contributing to composition of cloudwater and to wet deposition (Seinfeld and Pandis, 1998); and affect human health through inhalation (NRC, 1998). Existing and prospective air quality regulations impose standards on concentrations of atmospheric aerosols to protect human health and welfare (EPA, 1998). Chemical transport and transformation models representing the loading and geographical distribution of aerosols and precursor gases are needed to permit development of effective and efficient strategies for meeting air quality standards, and for examining aerosol effects on climate retrospectively and prospectively for different emissions scenarios. Important aerosol properties and processes depend on their size distribution: light scattering, cloud nucleating properties, dry deposition, and penetration into airways of lungs. The evolution of the mass loading itself depends on particle size because of the size dependence of growth and removal processes. For these reasons it is increasingly recognized that chemical transport and transformation models must represent not just the mass loading of atmospheric particulate matter but also the aerosol microphysical properties and the evolution of these properties if aerosols are to be accurately represented in these models. If the size distribution of the aerosol is known, a given property can be evaluated as the integral of the appropriate kernel function over the size distribution. This has motivated the approach of determining aerosol size distribution, and of explicitly representing this distribution and its evolution in chemical transport models.
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