The method of moments is a powerful tool for directly calculating the lower-order moments of an aerosol size distribution without full knowledge of the distribution itself. These moments can be tracked in space and time to represent the effects of nucleation, evaporation and growth, coagulation, and complex flowfield dynamics. This letter applies quadrature methods for efficient estimation of aerosol optical properties directly from a known moment sequence. The approach is demonstrated using particle size distributions obtained from fits to field measurements. Comparison of light-scattering phase functions and other integral optical properties calculated from the moments with those obtained from the full distributions shows that the lower-order moments lead to an efficient and accurate parametrization for these properties. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1995