Model evaluation and intercomparison of surface-level ozone and relevant species in East Asia in the context of MICS-Asia Phase III – Part 1: Overview

Li, Jie; Nagashima, Tatsuya; Kong, Lei; Ge, Baozhu; Yamaji, Kazuyo; Fu, Joshua S.; Wang, Xuemei; Fan, Qi; Itahashi, Syuichi; Lee, Hyo-Jung; Kim, Cheol-Hee; Lin, Chuan-Yao; Zhang, Meigen; Tao, Zhining; Kajino, Mizuo; Liao, Hong; Li, Meng; Woo, Jung-Hun; Kurokawa, Jun-ichi; Wang, Zhe; Wu, Qizhong; Akimoto, Hajime; Carmichael, Gregory R.; Wang, Zifa

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-12993-2019

Articles | Volume 19, issue 20

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-12993-2019

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

Special issue:

Regional assessment of air pollution and climate change over...

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-12993-2019

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

Articles | Volume 19, issue 20

Research article

|

21 Oct 2019

Research article |

| 21 Oct 2019

Model evaluation and intercomparison of surface-level ozone and relevant species in East Asia in the context of MICS-Asia Phase III – Part 1: Overview

Jie Li, Tatsuya Nagashima, Lei Kong, Baozhu Ge, Kazuyo Yamaji, Joshua S. Fu, Xuemei Wang, Qi Fan, Syuichi Itahashi, Hyo-Jung Lee, Cheol-Hee Kim, Chuan-Yao Lin, Meigen Zhang, Zhining Tao, Mizuo Kajino, Hong Liao, Meng Li, Jung-Hun Woo, Jun-ichi Kurokawa, Zhe Wang, Qizhong Wu, Hajime Akimoto, Gregory R. Carmichael, and Zifa Wang

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Final revised paper (published on 21 Oct 2019)
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Preprint (discussion started on 17 Jan 2019)
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Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Review of "Model evaluation and inter-comparison of surface-level ozone and relevant species in East Asia in the context of MICS-Asia phase III Part I: overview" by Li et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 16 Feb 2019
- AC1: 'Interactive comment on“Model evaluation and inter-comparison of surface-level ozone and relevant species in East Asia in the context of MICS-Asia phase III Part I: overview”', Jie Li, 30 Apr 2019
RC2: 'Model evaluation and inter-comparison of surface-level ozone and relevant species in East Asia in the context of MICS-Asia phase III Part I: overview.', Anonymous Referee #2, 20 Mar 2019
- AC2: 'Reply to review', Jie Li, 30 Apr 2019

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Jie Li on behalf of the Authors (21 May 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (21 May 2019) by Yugo Kanaya

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (01 Jun 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I think that the manuscript has been improved considerably, but there are still many points to be corrected, as described below.
I think that further improvement is necessary to be published.

<About the response to my comment 2>

What does the vertical axis on the right of Fig. R1 mean?
If it represents a 3 km mesh emission, contrary to what is stated in the response document or in the revised manuscript, it is likely that the observation points receive local emissions.

The following is a comment on the revised manuscript other than the above.

Page 11 Line 11: It describes the measuring instruments, but which measuring stations adopt these measuring instruments?

<About the response of my Comment 3>

It is said that the ensemble of models underestimates the measured values of dry deposition velocity from August to September in EA1, but according to Figure R3 it is actually overestimated.
Therefore, the claims in the response document or in the revised manuscript that underestimation of dry deposition velocity contributed to overestimation of summer ozone concentrations are false and need to be reviewed.

The following are comments on the revised manuscript other than the above.

Section 3.5: The sentences are difficult to understand. I think that English native check is necessary first.
Page 16 Line 4-5: I do not understand the meaning of this sentence.
Page 16 Line 27 "summer": A statement from May to July, not summer, is more logical.
Page 17 Line 3-4: According to Fig.9, contrary to the description in the revised manuscript,
the model underestimated the observed values of Vd.
Page 18 Line 7-8: The description in this sentence should indicate that it is a description of the observed value.
Page 18 Line 16: What are "previous theoretical results"?
Page 19 Line 15-25: At the beginning of chapter 5, you have mentioned that you evaluated dry deposition, PBL, and chemistry.
I do not understand why the discussion about the meteorological field comes out suddenly here.

<About the response of my Comment 6>

Page 5 Line 9-10: This sentence is about how to validate the model,
so this sentence should be moved to chapter 3 which discusses it.

<About the response of my Comment 9>

Page 7 Line 2-6: Make a description that shows the correspondence between the model and the university.

<About the response of my Comment 17>

It is understood from Appendix A that various statistics are derived taking into account only the variation due to the location (i) of the measuring station, but in fact it seems that temporal variations are also taken into consideration.
This is because, for example, in Page 11 Line 22-24, as the reason for the high correlation, the high reproducibility of the monthly variation is mentioned.

<About the response of my Comment 27>

I understood that all models must be identified in Fig.2 and Fig.3.
However, since it is still difficult to identify models by color, I hope that at least models that appear in the discussion in chapter 5　can be identified by such as drawn lines.

<Other technical corrections to the revised manuscript>

As there are many necessary technical corrections, I would like you to carefully review the entire manuscript. .
Some of them are shown below.

Page 2 Line 2: "Evaluated and intercompared to O3 observations" perhaps should be "intercompared and evaluated to O3 observations".
page 2 Line 7-8: "western pacific rim" is repeated twice.
Page 8 Line 25: "Table1" should be "Table2".
Page 11 Line 27: "Table1" should be "Table2".
page 14 line 27: The word "other" should be added before "combined influence".
Page 17 Line 24 "Sillman and He et al.": "Et al" shoud be removed.
Page 20 Line 10-11: There is an incomplete sentence.
Some of figures: "EA3" should be replaced by "EA2", and "EA4" should be replaced by "EA3".

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ED: Reconsider after major revisions (18 Jun 2019) by Yugo Kanaya

Dear Dr. Jie Li and co-authors,

Although the manuscript is improved, still many fundamental and technical points are present needing revision. Please examine comments from the reviewer #1 carefully, and the following comments by the Co-Editor. Recheck English throughout the manuscript with a native speaker.

(pages and lines are for the change-track version)

1. Page 2, line 18: In terms of
2. Page 2, line 20: hPa
3. Page 3, line 21: do not
4. Page 5, lines 19-20: Better to place the following inserted sentence elsewhere (page 8-9?): If two or more observation sites were in the same grid of model, their mean values will be used to evaluate model performance.
5. Page 6, line 18. possibly
6. Page 8, lines 18-20: More explanation and clarification about the local sources and sinks are necessary, as requested by the reviewer. Not only for NOx but also VOC, representativeness is necessary.
7. Page 8, line 28: exhibited
8. Page 9, line 1: Molybdenum converters
9. Page 9, lines 2-5. The results must be dependent on the conditions (with different NOz/NOx). Where did the comparison take place? Uncertainty should be estimated to cover all possible conditions (urban to rural) used for the study.
10. Page 9, line 16: parts per billion by volume
11. Page 9, line 19: and M7
12. Page 9, line 20: closer to
13. Page 9, line 20: M11 simulated O_3 with RMSEs of
14. Page 12, line 26: existed
15. Page 13, line 21. approximately 20 and 10 ppbv
16. Page 14, line 7: showed a better performance
17. Page 15, line 5: What is meant by short-lived species?
18. Page 15, line 25: Figure 5 shows
19. Page 15, lines 27-28 and elsewhere: hPa
20. Page 16, line 7: The mean standard deviations (SD) of models (1σ) Use SD instead of σ later.
21. Page 23, line 16. MICS
22. Page 27, lines 23. Ensemble mean values rather OVERESTIMATES v_d (Fig. 9). Discussion needs to be revised (conclusion also). Representativeness of deposition velocity observations over the domains needs to be discussed. I doubt that grassland represents the whole domain region.
23. Page 28, lines 3-4. October-November, simulated vd apparently overestimated observations by 30-50%. This is also opposite.
24. Page 29, line 6. Is this only because O3 is titrated with NO? The analysis never tells the regimes. Consider cases of O3 buildup and transport by consuming NOx. Even in the NOx limited regime, the NOx-O3 relationship constructed from geographical distribution will show a negative correlation. At least potential ozone (O3 + NO2) should be used for the analysis, and remove all statements on the regimes (particularly those in lines 22-23, page 29).
25. Page 30, line 6. Briefly mention how PBLH was measured.
26. Page 30, line 8. caused by the sampling bias between
27. Page 31, line 9. A model ensemble was produced
28. Page 31, line 14. A period character must be a comma?
29. At many times figures contain EA1, 3, and 4, instead of EA1, 2, and 3.

Yugo Kanaya, Co-Editor of ACP

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AR by Jie Li on behalf of the Authors (26 Jul 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (01 Aug 2019) by Yugo Kanaya

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (13 Aug 2019)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (14 Aug 2019) by Yugo Kanaya

Dear Authors,

This time the manuscript is much improved according to the previous comments. The reviewer #1 now provides smaller number of minor comments, which should be addressed. Despite previous request to recheck English, the Co-Editor still finds numerous errors and points of revions as follows. They are not all. Thorough checking is mandate, before recommended for publication.

(pages and lines are for the cleaned version)

1. Abstractm line 1. Rephrase "long-term" as one-year of study is short. For example, Spatio-temporal variations of ozone (O3) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) concentrations from ...
2. Page 2, Line 8. Compared to MICs-Asia II with a study period of four months, the evaluation WITH observations was extended...
3. Page 3, line 26. Page 4, line 13. extra space?
4. Page 4, line 6. The study shows
5. Page 4, lines 10-11. Incomplete sentence (rephrase "have rendering explaining..")
6. Page 4, line 17. have evolved into
7. Page 5, line 10. Use lower case for O3
8. Page 5, line 18. remove extra space and insert space before 2013
9. Page 6, line 4. Remove period character after hPa
10. Page 6, Line 8. remove "are"
11. Page 7, line 4. 2018 not 2017? Check all references.
12. Page 7, lines 24-26 and Page 8, lines 12-14. Similar sentences. Remove one of them.
13. Page 8, line 29, oxides
14. Page 10, line 19. Insert space after O3
15. Page 10, line 19. Check font of "Most of the"
16. Page 11, lines 6, 17, and 18. Model never measures. Better rephrased to "difficulty in estimating", "in simulating summer patterns", and "simulating winter patterns"
17. Page 12, Line 5. all models showed
18, Page 12, Line 7. High correlations were found
19. Page 12, Line 15, Add space after O3.
20. Page 12, Line 17. Remove extra space after overestimation
21. Page 12, Line 24, Remove "and" before "likely"
22. Page 13, Line 5 and Table 4. Please double check consisntency in the ranges between text and Table. Line 6. For NMBs for EA1, high values from M8-10 are likely omitted. Line 7. Correlation coefficients. Not 0.54 but 0.43, if including M8.
23. Page 13, Line 9. Incomplete sentence.
24. Page 13, Line 11. Not 0.5 but 0.43 when including M2.
25. Page 13, Line 12. Which model has -0.42?
26. Page 13, Line 14. Change font of "the"
27. Page 14, Line 25. The high values
28. Page 15, line 9. Insert space after "lowest levels of"
29. Page 16, Line 3. Lowercase for O3
30. Page 16, lines 10-11. Different sites for II and III for same labels? (e.g., site 4 is Sado-seki in a viewgraph and is Oki for another panel?)
31. Page 16, Line 12. remove "been"
32. Page 16, Line 16, enhanced concentrations simulated for
33. Page 17, line 1. replace "be" with "were"
34. Page 17, Line 2 and 5. dry deposition (not depositions)
35. Page 19, Line 15. Change ~ to -
36. Page 19, line 27. remove extra space before Guo
37. Page 20, Line 5, add space before 2016
38. Page 20, line 6. Remove "and" before "likely"
39. Page 20, line 1 and 11. Add space before 1996 and before 100-200 m
40. Page 20, line 15. were not was
41. Page 20 Line 19. East Asia
42. Page 28, Remove ACPD for Li, M. et al.

Yugo Kanaya, Co-Editor of ACP

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AR by Jie Li on behalf of the Authors (21 Aug 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (02 Sep 2019) by Yugo Kanaya

AR by Jie Li on behalf of the Authors (06 Sep 2019) Manuscript

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Short summary

This study evaluated and intercompared 14 CTMs with ozone observations in East Asia, within the framework of the Model Inter-Comparison Study for ASIA Phase III (MICS-Asia III). Potential causes of the discrepancies between model results and observation were investigated by assessing the planetary boundary layer heights, emission fluxes, dry deposition, chemistry and vertical transport among models. Finally, a multi-model estimate of pollution distributions was provided.