New particle formation in the volcanic eruption plume of the Piton de la Fournaise: specific features from a long-term dataset

Rose, Clémence; Foucart, Brice; Picard, David; Colomb, Aurélie; Metzger, Jean-Marc; Tulet, Pierre; Sellegri, Karine

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-13243-2019

Articles | Volume 19, issue 20

Atmos. Chem. Phys., 19, 13243–13265, 2019

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-13243-2019

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

Atmos. Chem. Phys., 19, 13243–13265, 2019

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-13243-2019

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

Articles | Volume 19, issue 20

Research article 28 Oct 2019

Research article | 28 Oct 2019

New particle formation in the volcanic eruption plume of the Piton de la Fournaise: specific features from a long-term dataset

Clémence Rose et al.

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Final revised paper (published on 28 Oct 2019)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 08 Feb 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of Rose et al. , ACPD 2019 : New particle formation in the active volcanic plume of Piton de la Fournaise : specific features from a long-term dataset', Anonymous Referee #1, 26 Mar 2019
- AC1: 'Reply to Referee #1', Clémence ROSE, 04 Jul 2019
RC2: 'Referee comment', Anonymous Referee #2, 24 Apr 2019
- AC2: 'Reply to Referee #2', Clémence ROSE, 04 Jul 2019

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Clémence ROSE on behalf of the Authors (08 Jul 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (12 Jul 2019) by Veli-Matti Kerminen

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (03 Sep 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The revised version of the manuscript is greatly improved. I have a few minor issues to be reconsidered.

My only problem with the current manuscript is related to the detail of interpretation of the nucleation mechanism responsible for new particle formation (NPF) in the observed volcanic plumes. I agree with that the authors in that they have managed to demonstrate the crucial role of sulfur emitted by the volcano in causing NPF but, in lack of particle measurements below 10 (except ions) and no gaseous H2SO4 measurements, I really doubt anything concrete can be said about the actual nucleation mechanism involving H2SO4. Furthermore, the authors mention the important role of ion-induced nucleation at lower H2SO4 levels based on comparisons to a model parameterization. Do the authors have any support for this based on their observations? From AIS measurements, one could calculate the formation rate of 2 nm ions and this could be compared to the total formation rate of 2 nm particles obtained from equation 2. Admittedly, such a comparison would remain qualitative, rather than quantitative, but it might reveal the conditions under which ion-induced nucleation is expected to be most important (not just the level of H2SO4 concentration).

The authors report an interesting, and rare, observation that the intensity of NPF is higher at larger values of condensation sink (CS) in volcanic plumes. I fully agree on the interpretations that the authors make on this. There is a very recent paper (Hakala et al. 2019, ACP 19, page 10555) where an exactly similar thing was observed in western Saudi-Arabia. There, SO2 emissions from localized anthropogenic sources apparently caused NPF, but the overall idea seemed to be very similar to this paper: in plumes containing plenty of sulfur, NPF seems not be limited by the presence of pre-existing particles. The author could mention the study of Hakala et al (2019) shortly in their paper, especially since the results of these two papers seem to support each other strongly.

A couple of minor grammatical issues:

page 13, line 9: …injected into the atmosphere…
it is common to write: …, however,… (several places)
it might be clearer to write "… gas-to-particle conversion…"

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (06 Sep 2019) by Veli-Matti Kerminen

AR by Clémence ROSE on behalf of the Authors (14 Sep 2019) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

New particle formation (NPF) is a significant climate-relevant source of aerosols in the atmosphere. We show that during the eruptive periods of the Piton de la Fournaise in 2015, NPF was favoured compared to regular days. Using the largest dataset ever reported in volcanic plume conditions, we quantify the emission rates of particles over a broad size range and provide a new statistically robust parameterization to take into account this important source of atmospheric particles in models.