Reconciling differences in stratospheric ozone composites

Ball, William T.; Alsing, Justin; Mortlock, Daniel J.; Rozanov, Eugene V.; Tummon, Fiona; Haigh, Joanna D.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-12269-2017

Articles | Volume 17, issue 20

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-12269-2017

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-12269-2017

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

Articles | Volume 17, issue 20

Research article

|

16 Oct 2017

Research article |

| 16 Oct 2017

Reconciling differences in stratospheric ozone composites

William T. Ball, Justin Alsing, Daniel J. Mortlock, Eugene V. Rozanov, Fiona Tummon, and Joanna D. Haigh

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Final revised paper (published on 16 Oct 2017)
Preprint (discussion started on 15 Mar 2017)

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-2017-142', Marko Laine, 20 Apr 2017
- AC1: 'Response to Referee #1: Marko Laine', William Ball, 28 Jul 2017
RC2: 'Review of Ball et al', Daan Hubert, 14 May 2017
- AC2: 'Response to Referee #2: Daan Hubert', William Ball, 28 Jul 2017

Peer-review completion

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

AR by William Ball on behalf of the Authors (28 Jul 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (05 Aug 2017) by Bernd Funke

RR by Marko Laine (21 Aug 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

\noindent{\bf Second review of acp-2017-142}

The authors have made a comprehensive work on revising the manuscript.
As a result the, already quite long, manuscript has grown in size. The authors have changed the computational methodology for data merge from particle filter to MCMC, which now estimates the correct statistical distribution. Also, some errors found during the review process are said to be corrected. Combination and propagation of uncertainties from various sources for remote sensing of atmospheric constituents is not an easy task and the manuscript describes in detail several steps that are taken to achieve the goal. In addition they now discuss possible shortcomings and the remedies. The authors have accounted all my previous concerns and I am now happy with the manuscript.

\noindent{\bf Small comments}

The acronym BASIC does not stand out very well, so it might not be a good choice if the authors would like to advertise their approach and it to easily found by search engines.

You only mention MCMC once in line 293. You could note that the HMC algorithm used in data merge is an MCMC algorithm, too, as well as that the posterior analysis for the variance parameters in the DLM model is done by MCMC sampling (if this is the case).

In the subsection 4.2 "Example results of the BASIC approach", you could more clearly state that you are dealing with synthetic data sets. The title could be e.g. "Testing BASIC with synthetic data".

The marginal posterior densities in Fig. A4-A7 could be smoothed a little as the wiggles are probably caused by small sample size and the choice of kernel density estimator bandwidth parameter and are not showing real features in the posteriors.

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (22 Aug 2017) by Bernd Funke

AR by William Ball on behalf of the Authors (06 Sep 2017) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

Several ozone composites show different decadal trends, even in composites built with the same data. We remove artefacts affecting trend analysis with a new method (BASIC) and construct an ozone composite, with uncertainties. We find a significant ozone recovery since 1998 in the midlatitude upper stratosphere, with no hemispheric difference. We recommend using a similar approach to construct a composite based on the original instrument data to improve stratospheric ozone trend estimates.