“…To avoid specifying the shape of the distribution a priori, the quadrature method of moments (QMOM) developed by McGraw (1997) approximates the integral moments of the size distribution by an n-point Gaussian quadrature (Gordon, 1968;Hulburt & Katz, 1964). The QMOM does not deÿne or produce an explicit size distribution, but the moments could, in principle, be used with an assumed functional form to obtain a size distribution (Barrett & Webb, 1998;McGraw, Nemesure, & Schwartz, 1998;Diemer & Olson, 2002). For comparison to experiment or other computational methods, having only a list of higher moments and not a size distribution or an easy means of obtaining quantities like the geometric standard deviation is a signiÿcant disadvantage of the QMOM method, as discussed further below.…”