Technical note: Intercomparison of three AATSR Level 2 (L2) AOD products over
China

Che, Yahui; Xue, Yong; Mei, Linlu; Guang, Jie; She, Lu; Guo, Jianping; Hu, Yincui; Xu, Hui; He, Xingwei; Di, Aojie; Fan, Cheng

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-9655-2016

Articles | Volume 16, issue 15

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-9655-2016

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

Special issue:

Pan-Eurasian Experiment (PEEX)

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-9655-2016

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

Articles | Volume 16, issue 15

Technical note

|

02 Aug 2016

Technical note |

| 02 Aug 2016

Technical note: Intercomparison of three AATSR Level 2 (L2) AOD products over China

Yahui Che, Yong Xue, Linlu Mei, Jie Guang, Lu She, Jianping Guo, Yincui Hu, Hui Xu, Xingwei He, Aojie Di, and Cheng Fan

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Final revised paper (published on 02 Aug 2016)
Preprint (discussion started on 16 Mar 2016)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'review report', Anonymous Referee #1, 25 Mar 2016
- SC1: 'Responses', Yong Xue, 04 May 2016
- AC1: 'Author Responses on behalf of all Co-Authors (AC)', Y. Xue, 09 May 2016
RC2: 'Review of Che et al', Anonymous Referee #2, 25 Mar 2016
- SC2: 'Responses', Yong Xue, 04 May 2016
- AC2: 'Author Responses on behalf of all Co-Authors (AC)', Y. Xue, 09 May 2016

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Yong Xue on behalf of the Authors (18 May 2016)

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (28 May 2016) by Aijun Ding

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (28 May 2016)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (31 May 2016)

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (01 Jun 2016) by Aijun Ding

AR by Yong Xue on behalf of the Authors (20 Jun 2016) Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (21 Jun 2016) by Aijun Ding

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (27 Jun 2016)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I reviewed two previous versions of this paper, and had concerns about the statistical techniques used and consequent validity and usefulness of the analysis. In this version the authors have improved by removing the problematic statistical analysis. I appreciate the authors’ efforts on this, and recommend publication after a few minor corrections, as this will now be a useful intercomparison of three data sets. The manuscript will need some general proof-reading and copy-editing; my comments are below:

Page 3, line 22: I suggest changing ‘cloud removal’ to ‘cloud screening’ because ‘removal’ is often use to mean aerosols washed out of the atmosphere by clouds, while what the authors refer to is instead the process of identify which pixels contain clouds and which do not.

Page 6, line 7: +/-50x50 km is a somewhat larger area than used in the Ichoku and Levy papers cited here (they use more like 25 or 27.5 km instead). It is probably worth noting that you are using different distance ranges here, rather than following the Ichoku/Levy technique exactly.

Page 8, general: the terms ‘lowly relevance’ and ‘highly relevance’ are strange and not intuitive. I understand that ‘lowly relevance’ means data which are a bad match (larger than average error), and ‘highly relevance’ means data which are a good match (smaller than average error). Perhaps alternative terms could be used here, e.g. ‘close to truth’ or ‘far from truth’?

Section 3: I still think that splitting the results up by year is a bad idea. The sample size is too small to infer year-to-year changes in performance in a robust way, and splitting by year just adds complexity. Figure 1 now combines the years (which is good) but I would prefer if the text and tables did the same thing. However this is not a huge problem so up to the editor and authors if they wish to make further changes.

Section 3.3: I still think that the data volume is too low to infer the year-to-year variability of performance at these sites. I would prefer that this analysis were therefore either removed, or a clear caveat about the data volume put at the start. The analysis gives some useful information but it is important not to over-interpret results from a small selection of data points.

Page 26, line 28: an unstable data server URL is not appropriate in a journal for a reference about what Angstrom exponent is. This should be replaced with a proper reference. Eck et al (1999), doi:10.1029/1999JD900923 is one paper commonly used as a citation about this. Or, the authors could go back to Angstrom’s original papers.

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ED: Reconsider after minor revisions (Editor review) (28 Jun 2016) by Aijun Ding

AR by Yong Xue on behalf of the Authors (29 Jun 2016) Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (03 Jul 2016) by Aijun Ding

AR by Yong Xue on behalf of the Authors (09 Jul 2016)

Short summary

Remotely sensed data could provide continuous spatial coverage of aerosol property over the pan-Eurasian area for PEEX program. The AATSR data can be used to retrieve aerosol optical depth (AOD). The Aerosol_cci project provides users with three AOD retrieval algorithms for AATSR data. Because China is vast in territory and has great differences in terms of land surfaces, the combination of the AERONET and CARSNET data can validate the Level 2 AOD products from AATSR data more comprehensively.