AeroMig: Multi-modal Inverse-Gamma modeling for aerosol particle number size distributions

Abstract

Aerosol particles play a critical role in air quality, human health, and climate processes, making their accurate characterization essential. One common way to represent aerosol populations is through particle number size distributions (PNSDs), which describe the concentration of particles across different mobility diameters. However, these distributions are often highly skewed, heavy-tailed, and multi-modal, posing significant challenges for conventional fitting approaches. In this study, we propose a robust parametric framework (AeroMiG) for modeling PNSDs using Inverse-Gamma mixture distributions. The method represents observed size distributions as a superposition of multiple Inverse-Gamma components, enabling flexible modeling of asymmetric and heavy-tailed structures that are not well captured by widely-used Log-Gaussian based approaches. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using real-world data from three measurement stations. Results are assessed using multiple criteria, including predictive accuracies, computational efficiency, and a composite score summarizing overall model quality. Comparative analysis against a widely used Aerosol Multi-mode Log-Gaussian (AeroMG) demonstrates that the AeroMiG framework consistently achieves improved fitting accuracy, lower error, and faster computation. The proposed approach provides a reliable and computationally efficient solution for modeling complex aerosol size distributions, with potential applications in real-time air quality monitoring and data-driven environmental analysis.