Technical note: The US Dobson station network data record prior to 2015, re-evaluation of NDACC and WOUDC archived records with WinDobson processing software

Evans, Robert D.; Petropavlovskikh, Irina; McClure-Begley, Audra; McConville, Glen; Quincy, Dorothy; Miyagawa, Koji

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-12051-2017

Articles | Volume 17, issue 19

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-12051-2017

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

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Twenty-five years of operations of the Network for the Detection...

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-12051-2017

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

Articles | Volume 17, issue 19

Technical note

|

11 Oct 2017

Technical note |

| 11 Oct 2017

Technical note: The US Dobson station network data record prior to 2015, re-evaluation of NDACC and WOUDC archived records with WinDobson processing software

Robert D. Evans, Irina Petropavlovskikh, Audra McClure-Begley, Glen McConville, Dorothy Quincy, and Koji Miyagawa

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Final revised paper (published on 11 Oct 2017)
Preprint (discussion started on 08 May 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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AC1: 'Omitted Paragraph', Robert Evans, 10 May 2017
RC1: 'Review of Evans et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 24 May 2017
RC2: 'Review of teh paper by Evans et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 07 Jun 2017
RC3: 'Anonymous referee comment acp-2017-383', Anonymous Referee #3, 09 Jun 2017

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Robert Evans on behalf of the Authors (08 Aug 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (09 Aug 2017) by Hal Maring

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (24 Aug 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Referee's comments on revised manuscript acp-2017-383 (Evans et al.)

This reviewer appreciates the efforts of the authors to respond to the many comments given by the three referees, and I believe the revised version of the manuscript is now considerably improved, with a number of important changes having been made, perhaps most significantly the statement that the raw data and software are publicly available.
I still have some degree of unease, which the Dobson community might also feel, about the fact that despite both the traditional NOAA processing and WinDobson claiming to be fully compliant with the standard data reduction as specified in GAW 183, differences nevertheless arise in the reported ozone results which can be surprisingly large. In the current work, these differences are attributed largely to different zenith corrections and other aspects of processing that are not fully specified in GAW 183. Is the implication then that ozone values reported from stations around the world might have significant inconsistencies for the same reason, despite using the specified GAW data reduction?
I also make the comment that the title of the paper is slightly misleading in that it is not only the different processing which is being compared but also the results of a thorough revision of the old record, as well as the apparent discovery of long periods of missing or out-of-date data in the WOUDC and NDACC archives. The comparison plots in figures 3 to 17 reflect the combination of all these aspects, not just the reprocessing as such.
Could I please ask that the authors very briefly address these two points in their conclusion? (Their perspective might be quite different to mine but I would like to see a sentence or two on both).
There are some points where I still disagree with the authors (for example, the usefulness of fitting a long-term linear trend to the corrected dataset), but will not insist on any changes being made.
I am pleased to see additional references such as Josefsson & Löfvenius (2008) on zenith corrections and Miyagawa (1996) on the WinDobson system, although I note the description there is mainly of the hardware control.
Therefore, I am hoping that the source code for the WinDobson data reduction module is also available on request?

Minor corrections:
Line 37: "Measurements on either direct solar light or scattered from the zenith" -> "… or light scattered from the zenith"
Line 41: "… measured if instrument was outside the Earth's atmosphere" – please correct
Line 45: "The concept of measurement of Dobson spectrophotometer" -> "… of the Dobson spectrophotometer"
Line 49: I don't see a reason why the "p" in photomultiplier should be a capital?
Line 53: (as above)
Line 56: I suggest re-wording along the lines "attenuation by ozone and by other scattering and absorption during the UV light's passage through the atmosphere"
Line 82: This report is still being inconsistently referred to – in other places it is called Komhyr & Evans 2008
Line 91: Missing "." at end of sentence
Line 109: "normally done four to six year schedule" -> "normally done on a four to six year schedule"
Line 138: I suggest changing "personnel inspection" to "inspection by personnel"
Line 177: "modification the reference lamp correction" -> "modification to the reference lamp correction"
Line 188 "unclear how the drift correction this was actually performed…" – remove the word "this"
Line 224 "rain entering instrument shelter" -> "rain entering the instrument shelter"
Line 257 The bracket needs to be closed after the word "processing".
Line 288 "compatible with NOAA system" -> "compatible with the NOAA system"
Line 318 "there are is random differences" – remove "is"
Line 349 "University of Fairbanks" -> "the University of Fairbanks"
Line 500 "Ozone symposium in Italy" – this needs a proper reference
Line 506 This reference is out of alphabetical order
Line 518 "axes" -> "axis"
Line 595 "… for an agreement of 2% occurs in 91% of cases" – remove the word "for"

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (28 Aug 2017) by Hal Maring

Short summary

The record of the total ozone column (TOC) from stations using the Dobson ozone spectrophotometer is one of the longest geophysical records in existence. Recent adoption of a new data processing scheme, with improved results prompted a complete reprocessing of the historical record from these NOAA/NDACC sites. As the original record of TOC from these stations are used for trend analysis and satellite verification, the scientific community should be aware of the changes in the new data set.