Cloud macro-physical properties in Saharan-dust-laden and dust-free North Atlantic trade wind regimes: a lidar case study

Gutleben, Manuel; Groß, Silke; Wirth, Martin

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-10659-2019

Articles | Volume 19, issue 16

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-10659-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

The Saharan Aerosol Long-range Transport and Aerosol-Cloud-interaction...

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-10659-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 19, issue 16

Research article

|

23 Aug 2019

Research article |

| 23 Aug 2019

Cloud macro-physical properties in Saharan-dust-laden and dust-free North Atlantic trade wind regimes: a lidar case study

Manuel Gutleben, Silke Groß, and Martin Wirth

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Final revised paper (published on 23 Aug 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 05 Feb 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Comment to manuscript acp-2019-26 "Cloud macro-physical properties in Saharan dust laden and dust free North Atlantic trade wind regimes: A lidar study" by Manuel Gutleben, Silke Groß, and Martin Wirth', Anonymous Referee #1, 19 Mar 2019
RC2: 'Review of Gutleben et al., act-2019-26', Anonymous Referee #2, 20 Mar 2019
AC1: 'Final Authors' Response to Referee Comments', Manuel Gutleben, 13 Jun 2019

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Manuel Gutleben on behalf of the Authors (13 Jun 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (14 Jun 2019) by Corinna Hoose

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (20 Jun 2019)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (03 Jul 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Review of Gutleben et al., ACP 2019 (based on the revised manuscript version of 28 July 2019)

General comments

The authors did a great job in considering the reviewers’ comments and improving the manuscript. The weakest parts of the initial manuscript were some missing explanations and the consideration of the first NARVAL campaign from 2013.
In the revised manuscript, the authors included the dataset from the first NARVAL campaign, which improves the manuscript significantly. They also improved their explanations and discussed other possibilities that could cause the observed correlations.
In my opinion, the authors put a lot of work into the manuscript and it is ready to be published after considering a few very minor comments. No need to see the manuscript again.

Minor comments
Page 1, Line 9 – 12: I would suggest removing the sentence “These observations … in the dust-free winter-season”. Instead, you can change the sentence before to: “Airborne lidar measurements in the vicinity of Barbados performed for both campaigns are used to investigate …. Saharan dust layers.

Page 4, Text for Figure 1: NARVAL-1 was also dust free, right? Maybe you can write then: NARVAL-I and NARVAL-II dust-free flights (light grey).
I had a hard time seeing the differences between the dark grey, green and red track on my printed copy. Maybe you can just use the light grey color for the dust-free flights. It doesn’t really matter if it was a flight from the first or the second NARVAL campaign.

Page 5, Line 11: Be consistent with the following line and write “RF7” instead of just “7”.

Page 8, Line 3 – 6: Maybe it makes sense to show Figure 3 before Figure 2 because you explain Figure 3 in the first paragraph of subsection 3.1.

Page 10, Figure 5:
1. Exchange the lower left plot (Alt vs delta u) with the lower right plot (delta MR). Then you have all velocities in one column.
2. Add a letter (a,b,c,…) to every plot and refer to it in the text. It makes it much easier to find the plot that you are talking about. It also makes it easier to find the associated explanation in the text.

Page 13, Figure 6: The label of the vertical axis is wrong. It should be replaced by “Altitude [m]”.

Page 13, Line 16: The sentence “In both regions the frequency of cloud length occurrence decreases strongly with increasing cloud length.” is not true for a cloud length > 5. There you see an increase.

Page 15, Figure 8: The label in the lower right plot shows a “T” instead of a “Tau”. Maybe you should also add letters here, like I suggested for Figure 5.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (10 Jul 2019) by Corinna Hoose

AR by Manuel Gutleben on behalf of the Authors (15 Jul 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (26 Jul 2019) by Corinna Hoose

AR by Manuel Gutleben on behalf of the Authors (29 Jul 2019) Manuscript

Short summary

This study concentrates on airborne lidar measurements conducted during the NARVAL field experiments over the western subtropical North Atlantic Ocean to study differences between shallow marine cloud macro-physical properties (i.e. cloud fraction, cloud top height, cloud length, cloud gap length) in Saharan-dust-laden and dust-free trade wind regions. Cloud top heights, cloud fractions and cloud lengths are found to be lower and smaller in Saharan-dust-laden compared to dust-free regions.