Temporal characteristics of atmospheric ammonia and nitrogen dioxide over China based on emission data, satellite observations and atmospheric transport modeling since 1980

Liu, Lei; Zhang, Xiuying; Xu, Wen; Liu, Xuejun; Li, Yi; Lu, Xuehe; Zhang, Yuehan; Zhang, Wuting

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-9365-2017

Articles | Volume 17, issue 15

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-9365-2017

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-9365-2017

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

Articles | Volume 17, issue 15

Research article

|

07 Aug 2017

Research article |

| 07 Aug 2017

Temporal characteristics of atmospheric ammonia and nitrogen dioxide over China based on emission data, satellite observations and atmospheric transport modeling since 1980

Lei Liu, Xiuying Zhang, Wen Xu, Xuejun Liu, Yi Li, Xuehe Lu, Yuehan Zhang, and Wuting Zhang

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Final revised paper (published on 07 Aug 2017)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 21 Mar 2017)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Anonymous Review', Anonymous Referee #1, 14 Apr 2017
- AC1: 'Response to Referee 1', Xiuying Zhang, 16 Jun 2017
SC1: 'Comment on the use of IASI-NH3 data for trend analysis', Martin Van Damme, 21 Apr 2017
- AC2: 'Response to Short comments', Xiuying Zhang, 16 Jun 2017
RC2: 'Review of acp-2017-106', Anonymous Referee #2, 30 Apr 2017
- AC3: 'Response to Referee 2', Xiuying Zhang, 16 Jun 2017

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Xiuying Zhang on behalf of the Authors (16 Jun 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (26 Jun 2017) by Jennifer G. Murphy

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (05 Jul 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have made an effort to address reviewer comments. Most technical issues have been addressed, but I have several suggestions for further revision.

1) The authors state in their response that this analysis is important because of the discussion on "the possible interactions between NO2 and NH3". However, this really isn't included or addressed in the manuscript. What exactly have the authors learned about this interaction, given the current results of their work?

2) The authors mention the update in the NH3 retrieval in September 2014, but it's unclear whether they are actually using this updated retrieval. Are they? If so, please explicitly state this. If they aren't, they must include a comment (in response to the comment by Van Damme in the open discussion) on how they expect this update could affect their conclusions about NH3 trends, if at all.

Specific suggestions:

1) The trends are now included in %/yr. However, these are linear trends. So the authors must explain what this is relative to... Is it a % based on the first year of data? Or of the long term mean? First, NO2 increases by 4% per year to 2011, then decreases by 3.6 % per year to 2015... These % increases/decreases are very hard to compare when we don't know what the % is relative to. The authors must be more careful to explicitly explain how trends were calculated in their methods.

1) Section 2.3, the authors write "...although their thread values of 0.24 kg N ha-1 yr-1...". What is a "thread" value? This wording is not clear to me.

2) I think the trend lines in the top panels of Figure 3a and 3b should be removed, since they are no longer commenting on the linear trend using monthly means. As a further suggestion, it's strange having two different ranges on the same plot for the same species (bottom panels) For example, NO2 ranges from 1.5-3 on the left side, but from 1-7 on the right side). I suggest two separate narrow panels so that we can actually distinguish the lines.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (09 Jul 2017)

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (10 Jul 2017) by Jennifer G. Murphy

AR by Xiuying Zhang on behalf of the Authors (12 Jul 2017) Author's response Manuscript

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Short summary

We conducted temporal trend analysis of atmospheric NH₃ and NO₂ in China since 1980 based on emission data (during 1980–2010), satellite observations (for NH₃ since 2008 and for NO₂ since 2005) and atmospheric chemistry transport modeling (during 2008–2015). Our findings provide an overall insight into the temporal trends in both NO₂ and NH₃ since 1980, and the multivariate data used in this study have implications for estimating long-term Nr deposition datasets.