The authors have revised the manuscript to largely address the questions and comments raised by the Referees. Importantly, the highly speculative discussion of monocarboxylic acids enhancing the ice nucleation properties of the Asian dust particles has been removed. The manuscript should now be suitable for publication in ACP. There are however, several areas requiring further clarification and revision before the manuscript can be accepted for publication, as listed below. Please address each of these carefully. The manuscript also requires careful copy-editing to bring it up to proper English standards. The list of typos and other corrections below is not a complete list of all the grammatical errors.

Referee 1 asked for information regarding the function used to perform the various regressions, but this detail was not provided in the Response or revised manuscript. I believe they are asking what regression equation was used, e.g. the standard Pearson correlation, or the Demming equation, or another function. The Pearson correlation allows for uncertainty only in the y-variable, while Demming accounts for uncertainty in both the x and y variable. Therefore, the Demming regression seems more appropriate for the regression analysis performed here, as there is uncertainty in both variables. Please also provide the uncertainty for the variables plotted and used in each regression.

Page/line references are used for the following:

2/5: “as CCN and ice nuclei (IN).” should be deleted, as wet deposition also scavenges aerosol particles, and water soluble gases. The individual contribution of CCN, IN, aerosols, and gases to material found in the snow pack cannot be determined. “Thus, organic acids are scavenged by wet deposition from the upper troposphere.” is a more appropriate description.

4/1 & 4/8: should be “blow-down”

4/23: should be “were injected into an ion chromatograph”

5/24: “We found that differences in the concentrations of each monocarboxylic acids between sample #4 and sample #4’ are comparable to the relative standard deviation.” It is not clear what relative standard deviation you refer to here. Of standards analyzed? Please clarify.

6/2: “Higher concentrations of monocarboxylic acids were observed in the snow samples with the dust layers than those without dust layers in both 2009 and 2011.” Please state the values/range for the samples with versus dust layers to make a quantitative comparison. As the association of dust with the monocarboxylic acids is the major focus of this paper this data should be presented more clearly.

6/14: This single-sentence paragraph should be included in one of the neighboring paragraphs and not left on its own.

Results: A large amount of the measurement data are presented as text in the paper, which makes it hard to really grasp the main features of the dataset. Please provide more of the data in the form Figures, as possible, instead of just listing long strings of measured values in the text. A well designed Figure could nicely show the differences in the LWM carboxylic acid concentrations for the different years, and for layers with and without suspected significant dust contributions, for example.

Figure 2: What does the color scale correspond to? Please properly label this on the Figure and explain in the Figure caption. “means no data of dusts” does not make sense, please reword.

Figure 3: “Lines indicate trajectories the snow pit samples with dust layers.” does not make sense, please reword.

Figure 5: y-axes – is this the natural logarithm of the values? The axes labels say “ln”. I think these were changed from log-log to linear plots, and these axes labels need to be corrected.


Ryan Sullivan

Thank you for revising your manuscript following my Editor comments. It is now suitable for publication in ACP.

Ryan Sullivan