On the Generalized Theory of Atmospheric Particle Systems

Unification is both necessary and challenging for studying atmospheric particle systems, which are polydisperse systems containing particles of different sizes and shapes. A general framework is proposed to realize the first order generalization. Within this generalized framework, (1) atmospheric particle shapes are unified into self-similar fractals; (2) a self-similar particle is characterized by various power-law relationships; (3) by combining these power-law relationships for a single particle with Shannon’s maximum entropy principle and some concepts in statis-tical mechanics, unified maximum likelihoood number size distributions are of the Weibull form for atmospheric particle systems. Frontier disciplines (e. g., scaling, fractal, chaos and hierarchy) are argued to provide potential “tools” for such unification. Several new topics are raised for future research.