Our paper is motivated by the recent publication [98] in which the FDTDM was used to compute the LDR for smoke clusters of up to four mono- mers in order to analyze implications of depolarization lidar observations from the Cloud—Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) satel- lite [115]. We extend the analysis of Ref. [98] by con- sidering a more comprehensive and representative set of soot-particle models and using what we believe to be more relevant refractive indices.\citep{Mishchenko_2013}