Sources of springtime surface black carbon in the Arctic:  an adjoint analysis for April 2008

Qi, Ling; Li, Qinbin; Henze, Daven K.; Tseng, Hsien-Liang; He, Cenlin

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-9697-2017

Articles | Volume 17, issue 15

Atmos. Chem. Phys., 17, 9697–9716, 2017

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-9697-2017

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

Atmos. Chem. Phys., 17, 9697–9716, 2017

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-9697-2017

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

Articles | Volume 17, issue 15

Research article 15 Aug 2017

Research article | 15 Aug 2017

Sources of springtime surface black carbon in the Arctic: an adjoint analysis for April 2008

Ling Qi et al.

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Final revised paper (published on 15 Aug 2017)
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Preprint (discussion started on 27 Feb 2017)
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Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'review of Qi et al', Anonymous Referee #1, 20 Mar 2017
- AC1: 'Responses to comments from Referee #1', Ling Qi, 26 May 2017
- AC2: 'Responses to comments from Referee #1', Ling Qi, 26 May 2017
RC2: 'Referee Comment', Anonymous Referee #3, 28 Mar 2017
- AC3: 'Responses to comments from Referee #3', Ling Qi, 26 May 2017

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Ling Qi on behalf of the Authors (26 May 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (25 Jun 2017) by Xiaohong Liu

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (27 Jun 2017)

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (11 Jul 2017) by Xiaohong Liu

Dear authors,

The manuscript has been improved after revision following the reviewers comments. However, one reviewer has a comment to improve the grammar of the manuscript. see comment: "I suggest, however, that the authors carefully proof their paper for grammar, clarity, and flow before final publication. For example, in the revised draft the first sentences of paragraphs 4 and 5 of Summary and Conclusions seem to be redundant, with both referring to a large contribution from Asian anthropogenic sources in the form of chronic pollution on time scale of 1-2 months."

Based on my own reading, I would strongly suggest the authors to improve the clarity of sentences frequently appearing in the text. I pick up some, e.g.,
1. Page 1. Lines 20-21. what do you mean "the direct transport"?
2. Page 1. Line 30. "warms from global BC"?
3. Page 2. Lines 3 and 5. "climate effect". suggest to remove "climate".
4. Page 3. Line 11. "long-term average sources"?
5. Page 3. Line 24. "...are computationally limited in the spatial and temporal resolution of the source regions that can be considered"? this potion is difficult to understand.
6. Page 3. Line 28. "...over the spatial and temporal resolution of the model"?
7. Page 4. Lines 11-12. "source contributions to BC at the five sites to sources". It shall be "contributions to BC at the five sites from sources"
8. Page 13. Lines 4-5. "anthropogenic emissions of BC emitted"? shall be "anthropogenic BC emissions"
9. Page 16. Lines 17 and 18. what do you mean "far field source regions", and "near field emissions"?
10. Page 16. please cite the following paper which looks at the sensitivity of BC transport to Arctic to the horizontal resolution:
"Ma, P.-L., P. J. Rasch, J. D. Fast, R. C. Easter, W. I. Gustafson Jr., X. Liu, S. J. Ghan, and B. Singh (2014), Assessing the CAM5 physics suite in the WRF-Chem model: Implementation, resolution sensitivity, and a first evaluation for a regional case study, Geoscientific Model Development, 7, 755–778, doi:10.5194/gmd-7-755-2014."
11. Page 17. Line 11. "miss" -> "missed". what do you mean "WBF effects by the simply assumption"?
12. Page 17. Line 14. what do you mean "low Arctic" and "high Arctic"?
13. Page 17. Line 22. "emissions in the Pacific ocean"? is it sea salt?
14. Page 17. Line 24. "emissions at lower than higher latitudes." improve here.
15. Page 19. Line 1. "far field sources faraway than near field sources"? improve here.

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Short summary

We find that Asian anthropogenic sources are the largest contributors (~ 40 %) to surface BC in spring in the Arctic, inconsistent with previous studies which repeatedly identified sources of surface BC as anthropogenic emissions from Europe and Russia. It takes 12–17 days for Asian anthropogenic emissions to be transported to the Arctic surface. Additionally, a large fraction (40–65 %) of Asian contribution is in the form of chronic pollution on 1- to 2-month timescales.