Biomass burning at Cape Grim: exploring photochemistry using multi-scale modelling

Lawson, Sarah J.; Cope, Martin; Lee, Sunhee; Galbally, Ian E.; Ristovski, Zoran; Keywood, Melita D.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-11707-2017

Articles | Volume 17, issue 19

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-11707-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-11707-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 17, issue 19

Research article

|

05 Oct 2017

Research article |

| 05 Oct 2017

Biomass burning at Cape Grim: exploring photochemistry using multi-scale modelling

Sarah J. Lawson, Martin Cope, Sunhee Lee, Ian E. Galbally, Zoran Ristovski, and Melita D. Keywood

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Final revised paper (published on 05 Oct 2017)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 05 Dec 2016)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of acp-2016-932, Biomass burning at Cape Grim: exploring photochemistry using multi-scale modelling', Anonymous Referee #3, 05 Jan 2017
- AC1: 'Response to anonymous referee #3', Sarah Lawson, 06 Jul 2017
RC2: 'Review of "Biomass burning at Cape Grim..."', Anonymous Referee #1, 10 Jan 2017
- AC2: 'Response to anonymous referee #1', Sarah Lawson, 06 Jul 2017
RC3: 'Review of ACP-2016-932', Anonymous Referee #2, 15 Jan 2017
- AC3: 'Response to anonymous Referee #2', Sarah Lawson, 06 Jul 2017

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Sarah Lawson on behalf of the Authors (06 Jul 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (18 Jul 2017) by Alex B. Guenther

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (03 Aug 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

This paper performs a thorough evaluation CTM utilising two independent meteorological models to investigate the impact of two biomass burning events measured at Cape Grimm. The paper has been considerably improved following the earlier draft. It reads better, is clearer and more consistent in terminology, performs a more thorough meteorological evaluation and contains better analysis of the chemical history and production of O3 under the different scenarios. With a few minor changes as detailed below, the paper will be suitable for publication.

General comment:
It is good to see that there has been a more thorough, statistical meteorological and chemical evaluation. However, quite a lot has been relegated to the supplement. In general, I think any figure which is discussed in detail in the main paper in order to further the story should be included in the main paper, and only those figures which just add further evidence for the story and are not essential to it be put in the supplement. I would suggest the following are discussed in detail in the text, and so should be in the main paper:

S18. Wind direction plots for BB2, when evaluating sensitivity of plume detection to meteorology, in section 3.1.1

S11. Quantile-quantile plots for BC and CO, as discussed in section 3.1.1

S14. Quantile-Quantile plots of O3, as discussed in section 3.1.1

Specific comments:
Abstract – Note that the model produced spurious O3 titration events with higher MCEs, and performed best when MCE = 0.89 (close to observed). Highlight the importance of simulating transport and using back-trajectories (as in last paragraph on conclusion) in simulating O3 production, as you show the ozone production was due to Melbourne rather than the BB fire.

Ln 98. Delete second ‘.’

Ln 100. Take Giglio et al. out of brackets.

Ln 154. Please give a few references for other studies which vary emissions ‘linearly’. Please clarify – you mean by scaling emissions of all species by a constant factor?

Ln 221-236. Please refer to Figure 1 somewhere in this paragraph when discussing domains.

Ln. 255. Delete ‘T’

Ln 275. Reorder sentence: “Savanna category EFs from Andreae and Merlot (2001) were used as base case EFs in this work.”

Ln 278. ‘Used published’

Ln 275-293. You repeat several things unnecessarily in these two paragraphs, e.g. you state the lower (0.89), best estimate (0.92) and upper (0.95) MCEs several times. I think these two paragraphs could be merged into one to make more concise.

Ln 348. “BB1 and”

Ln 352. Delete space between “(Figure 5) .”

Figure 4 & 5. It would be good if you could present the panels for the two simulations side-by-side, as they are really quite different. In the interest of saving space, I would suggest presenting as one Figure, with a column from each CTM. I think you can remove the panels for 18 Feb 04:00, and maybe 15 Feb 16:00, without too much lost information. Please also add panels of wind direction timeseries compared to observations, similar to in Figure S18. In reference to the earlier comment, Figure S18 could then be the new Figure 5.

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (08 Aug 2017) by Alex B. Guenther

AR by Sarah Lawson on behalf of the Authors (04 Sep 2017) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

A high-resolution chemical transport model was used to reproduce observed smoke plumes. The model output was highly sensitive to fire emission factors and meteorology, particularly for secondary pollutant ozone. Aged urban air (age = 2 days) was the major source of ozone observed, with minor contributions from the fire. This work highlights the importance of assessing model sensitivity and the use of modelling to determine the contribution from different sources to atmospheric composition.