  We investigate the prospects for detecting and constraining density and
temperature inhomogeneities in the circumgalactic medium (CGM) using absorption
measurements of metal ions. Distributions in the gas thermal properties could
arise from turbulence, gas cooling from the hot phase, and mixing between the
cool and hot phases. Focusing on these physically motivated models, we
parameterize each with a single parameter for simplicity and provide empirical
and theoretical estimates for reasonable parameter values. We then construct
the probability distribution functions for each of these scenarios, calculate
the effective ion fractions, and fit our models to the COS-Halos absorption
measurements to infer the gas densities and metallicities. We find that the
models we consider (i) produce similarly good fits to the observations with or
without distributions in the gas thermal properties, and (ii) result in
detectable changes in the column densities only at the boundaries of reasonable
parameter values. We show that He II self-shielding can have a larger effect on
the ion fractions than density and temperature fluctuations. As a result,
uncertainties in cloud geometry and their spatial distribution, affecting the
details of radiation transfer, may obscure the effect of inhomogeneities.
