Remote sensing of soot carbon – Part 1: Distinguishing different absorbing aerosol species

Schuster, G. L.; Dubovik, O.; Arola, A.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-1565-2016

Articles | Volume 16, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-1565-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-1565-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 16, issue 3

Research article

|

11 Feb 2016

Research article |

| 11 Feb 2016

Remote sensing of soot carbon – Part 1: Distinguishing different absorbing aerosol species

G. L. Schuster, O. Dubovik, and A. Arola

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Final revised paper (published on 11 Feb 2016)
Preprint (discussion started on 12 May 2015)
Companion paper

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC C3282: 'review of manuscript', Anonymous Referee #1, 05 Jun 2015
- AC C7165: 'Response to referee #1', Gregory L. Schuster, 24 Sep 2015
RC C3600: 'Review of Schuster', Anonymous Referee #2, 14 Jun 2015
- AC C7166: 'Response to referee #2', Gregory L. Schuster, 24 Sep 2015
RC C4132: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #3, 29 Jun 2015
- AC C7167: 'Response to referee #3', Gregory L. Schuster, 24 Sep 2015

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Gregory L. Schuster on behalf of the Authors (24 Sep 2015) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (12 Oct 2015) by Philip Stier

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (22 Oct 2015)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors clearly improved their manuscript following the suggestions of the reviewers. It can be published in ACP with a few minor changes.

About new Section 2:
* On page 8 of the revised manuscript you write "... and a viable model of the radiances at angles where they are not available". In my view it does not make sense to calculate radiances at scattering angles that can not be observed. How would that work?
* Page 9 "increases the geometrical cross section": You probably mean "absorption cross section".
* Page 10 "(Simplified shapes may also be an issue for some in situ measurements that require Mie theory for calibration; e.g., optical particle sizers, nephelometer truncation corrections, etc.)": I suggest removing the brackets and moving it to where you discuss the validation efforts.
* Page 11 I would remove "(For instance, one could compute the column aerosol scattering and extinction optical depths using nephelometer and cavity ringdown measurements from aircraft profiles, and then ratio these two parameters to obtain the column single scatter albedo.)" or merge it with the previous sentence.

About new paragraphs in Section 5.2:
* How is mass absorption cross section defined here? Absorption per soot mass?
* Using RMS for calculating the uncertainty assumes that the underlaying uncertainties describe normal-distributed and independent quantities. This is surely not fulfilled here, so that the calculated RMS uncertainty of 62% might still be an underestimation of the true uncertainty. However, as a precise uncertainty analysis is hardly possible with the available data sets, I'm happy with the uncertainty analysis presented by the authors. It is probably not too far away from the true uncertainties of the approach.

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ED: Reconsider after minor revisions (Editor review) (24 Nov 2015) by Philip Stier

AR by Gregory L. Schuster on behalf of the Authors (07 Dec 2015) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (22 Dec 2015) by Philip Stier

AR by Gregory L. Schuster on behalf of the Authors (28 Dec 2015)

Short summary

We describe a method of using remote sensing of the refractive index to determine the relative contribution of carbonaceous aerosols and absorbing iron minerals. Monthly climatologies of fine mode soot carbon are low for West Africa and the Middle East, but the southern Africa and South America biomass burning sites have peak values that are much higher; this is consistent with expectations. Hence, refractive index is a practical parameter for quantifying soot carbon in the atmosphere.