The effects of intercontinental emission sources on  European air pollution levels

Jonson, Jan Eiof; Schulz, Michael; Emmons, Louisa; Flemming, Johannes; Henze, Daven; Sudo, Kengo; Tronstad Lund, Marianne; Lin, Meiyun; Benedictow, Anna; Koffi, Brigitte; Dentener, Frank; Keating, Terry; Kivi, Rigel; Davila, Yanko

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-18-13655-2018

Articles | Volume 18, issue 18

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-18-13655-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Global and regional assessment of intercontinental transport...

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-18-13655-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 18, issue 18

Research article

|

27 Sep 2018

Research article |

| 27 Sep 2018

The effects of intercontinental emission sources on European air pollution levels

Jan Eiof Jonson, Michael Schulz, Louisa Emmons, Johannes Flemming, Daven Henze, Kengo Sudo, Marianne Tronstad Lund, Meiyun Lin, Anna Benedictow, Brigitte Koffi, Frank Dentener, Terry Keating, Rigel Kivi, and Yanko Davila

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Final revised paper (published on 27 Sep 2018)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 16 Feb 2018)
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: 'much needed analysis, manuscript needs work', Anonymous Referee #2, 06 Mar 2018
- AC1: 'Response to reviewer 1', Jan Eiof Jonson, 08 Jun 2018
RC2: 'Interesting topic and solid scientific background but more work needed before publication', Anonymous Referee #1, 19 Apr 2018
- AC2: 'Answer to reviewer 2', Jan Eiof Jonson, 08 Jun 2018

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Jan Eiof Jonson on behalf of the Authors (25 Jun 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (28 Jun 2018) by Christian Hogrefe

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (19 Jul 2018)

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (26 Jul 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Review of the revised version of « The effects of intercontinental emission sources on European air pollution levels », submitted to Atmos. Chem. Phys by Jonson et al., 2018

The authors have done a fair job at addressing the comments raised during the first round of review. There remains a few items to be addressed but those should only now be considered minor revisions.

Abstract: More quantitative results from the conclusion should be included in the abstract. In particular the much lower contribution of European emission than found in HTAP1 and the subsequent increase of RAIR.

Section 3.1: Confirm the suspicious seasonal cycle at Rucava, Latvia (Supp Mat. Fig 4), on the same figure: are the observations for Pallas missing most of the year ? What is the temporal frequency on the scatter plots (Fig 7 of the Supp Mat), the legend says those are annual data, but it is surprising to see so many annual means, i.e. 1302 European stations for the EMEP network.

Conclusion: the lower impact of European emissions compared to HTAP1 is the most important result of the study (and perhaps of the whole HTAP2 project), it would deserve a few more words. Besides the actual sensitivity provided in L561, the standard deviation provided in the author response should also be included to support whether that signal is still significant. I am also missing here more conclusions on the importance of shipping, which is now isolated from the European signal (which was not the case in HTAP1) and to what extent this may also contribute to a lower role of European emissions compare to the previous assessment.

Technical comments

P2L30: CTMs are chemistry transport models

P4L105: the word “now” in “model data are now included in the database” is not appropriate with regards to the (long term) temporality expected from a peer reviewed paper

Supp. Matt. Figure 4 and 5 : the labels of the panels (a,b,c…) needs to be fixed.

P17L561: itself

P19L643: correct the acknowledgement

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (26 Jul 2018) by Christian Hogrefe

AR by Jan Eiof Jonson on behalf of the Authors (29 Aug 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (30 Aug 2018) by Christian Hogrefe

AR by Jan Eiof Jonson on behalf of the Authors (06 Sep 2018)

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Short summary

Focusing on Europe, this HTAP 2 study computes ozone in several global models when reducing anthropogenic emissions by 20 % in different world regions. The differences in model results are explored by use of a novel stepwise approach combining a tracer, CO and ozone. For ozone the contributions from the rest of the world are larger than from Europe, with the largest contributions from North America and eastern Asia. Contributions do, however, depend on the choice of ozone metric.