Other
Scientific paper
Dec 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufm.a13c0236b&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #A13C-0236
Other
[0305] Atmospheric Composition And Structure / Aerosols And Particles, [3344] Atmospheric Processes / Paleoclimatology, [3359] Atmospheric Processes / Radiative Processes, [6281] Planetary Sciences: Solar System Objects / Titan
Scientific paper
As part of an ongoing undergraduate research project of light scattering calculations involving fractal carbonaceous soot aggregates relevant to current anthropogenic and natural sources in Earth's atmosphere, we have read with interest a recent paper [E.T. Wolf and O.B Toon,Science 328, 1266 (2010)] claiming that the Faint Young Sun paradox discussed four decades ago by Carl Sagan and others can be resolved without invoking heavy CO2 concentrations as a greenhouse gas warming the early Earth enough to sustain liquid water and hence allow the origin of life. Wolf and Toon report that a Titan-like Archean Earth haze, with a fractal haze aggregate nature due to nitrogen-methane photochemistry at high altitudes, should block enough UV light to protect the warming greenhouse gas NH3 while allowing enough visible light to reach the surface of the Earth. To test this hypothesis, we have employed a rigorous T-Matrix arbitrary-particle light scattering technique, to avoid the simplifications inherent in Mie-sphere scattering, on haze fractal aggregates at UV and visible wavelenths of incident light. We generate these model aggregates using diffusion-limited cluster aggregation (DLCA) algorithms, which much more closely fit actual haze fractal aggregates than do diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA) algorithms.
Boness D. A.
Terrell-Martinez Bernice
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