Chengdu is a typical basin city of Southwest China with rare observations of remote sensing measurements. To assess the climate change and establish a region aerosol model, a deeper understanding of the separated volume size distribution (VSD) and complex refractive index (CRI) is required. In this study, we employed the sub-mode VSD and CRI in Chengdu based on the three years observation data to investigate the sub-mode characteristics and climate effects. The annual average fraction of the fine-mode aerosol optical depth (AOD f ) is 92%, which has the same monthly tendency as the total AOD. But the coarse-mode aerosol optical depth (AOD c ) has little variation in different months. There are four distinguishing modes of VSD in Chengdu; the median radii are 0.17 µm ± 0.05, 0.31 µm ± 0.12, 1.62 µm ± 0.45, 3.25 µm ± 0.99, respectively. The multi-year average and seasonal variations of fine-and coarse-mode VSD and CRI are also analyzed to characterize aerosols over this region. The fine-mode single scattering albedos (SSAs) are higher than the coarse-mode ones, which suggests that the coarse-mode aerosols have a stronger absorbing effect on solar light than the small-size aerosol particles in Chengdu.is conducive to the formation of aerosol particulates, which has made Chengdu become one of the regions in China with serious haze pollution [7][8][9][10]. The special topography and climate in Sichuan basin leads to a kind of wet, rainy and cloudy weather condition [11]. Therefore, it is difficult to obtain a large number of measurements through optical remote sensing observations in Chengdu. Sampling method of atmospheric particulates is one kind of Chengdu air pollution study [7,9,10,12], which fails to acquire the aerosol's larger-scale spatial characteristics. The spatial characteristics of aerosols can be obtained by remote sensing, one kind of non-contact method [13][14][15]. For instance, some studies analyzed the spatial-temporal distribution of aerosol optical depth (AOD) in Sichuan basin using satellite remote sensing [16,17]. Besides, aerosol optical parameters obtained by the ground-based remote sensing observation were statistically analyzed in this area [18][19][20][21].Although the above-mentioned research studies focus on the total-column aerosol properties by remote sensing methods, it still remains a big challenge to obtain the characteristics of sub-mode aerosol (fine-and coarse-mode) in Chengdu. The fine-and coarse-mode particles are related to the different sources and compositions. Fine-mode aerosols are mainly dominated by anthropogenic emissions and are related to the fog or low-altitude cloud dissipated events [22,23]. Coarse-mode particles are determined by the sea salt, dust and other natural sources. Therefore, the knowledge of aerosol sub-mode properties plays a role in the research on regional climate and the improvement of the aerosol model used in the satellite retrieval algorithms.In this study, the sub-mode volume size distribution (VSD) and complex refractive index (CRI) in Chengdu a...