Dear authors,
I am happy to accept your ms for publication in ACP subject to the technical amendments listed below. Thank you for addressing the referees' comments so thoroughly,
Sincerely,
Rob MacKenzie
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Abstract: You agree with Referee #1’s comment that your discussion of MAC is misleading because you look at the dry particles only. I think you should therefore remove the sentence discussing MAC in the abstract and be careful to caveat discussion of MAC in the main text.
Abstract: “BC coating”: Please change to “BC coating by hydrophilic compounds”.
Lines 56-57: The referees were keen for general statements like this to be made more explicit – i.e., are these smaller-scale studies of cloud microphysics, air quality, or both?
Line 69: this seems to be a bit ambiguous: different species of particles? Different chemical compounds forming the coatings?
Line 74 and elsewhere: please make it clear whether or not this study can say anything about the phase-state of the clouds causing wet deposition. Connect your discussion here to that at lines 361-367.
Line 81: please state for which ice nucleation mechanisms this is true (if all, say all).
Line 289: for non-native English speakers it might be better to say “were considered to be in [or within] a plume” because, as written it could mean that a subset of in-plume data were chosen.
Line 317: “synoptic-scale” is better, I think.
Lines 320-322. The logic gets a bit circuitous here. If the regime is dominated by convection, as implied by the end of the sentence on line 322, then capturing the frontal uplift is not sufficient (ie the trajectories are not sufficient) to capture the most important microphysical processes. Might it be better to accept the limitations of the Hysplit trajectory analysis and admit that there could be additional effects due to convection? At any rate, it would be much better if this sentence didn’t seriously diminish the reader’s confidence in the analysis, as it does now.
Lines 323ff: Convection also destroys the coherence of the trajectories and should be included in the list here.
Lines 345ff: I can see how one could say that Hysplit calculates times at which it is precipitating along a trajectory, but is it true to say that hysplit calculates the rate of precip? I would have guessed that it reads the precip from reanalyses, possibly interpolating in time and space. This might seem like hair-splitting but it is really just to avoid inexperienced colleagues misinterpreting how these trajectory products work.
Lines 357ff: please state the approximate height of the air trajectory as it passed through the regions of precip – just to save the reader having to skip back and forth to Fig 1.
Line 375: should “emission ratio” be amended to “tracer ratio” to be consistent with the change of name to the subsequent section?
Line 930: Please check status of Franklin et al. paper in ACP/D.
Line 1354: Please amend status of Taylor et al., in AMT/D, if appropriate.
Table 2: Please define sigma_geo in the caption of the table.