Aerosol optical properties over Europe: an evaluation of the AQMEII Phase 3 simulations against satellite observations

Palacios-Peña, Laura; Jiménez-Guerrero, Pedro; Baró, Rocío; Balzarini, Alessandra; Bianconi, Roberto; Curci, Gabriele; Landi, Tony Christian; Pirovano, Guido; Prank, Marje; Riccio, Angelo; Tuccella, Paolo; Galmarini, Stefano

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-2965-2019

Articles | Volume 19, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-2965-2019

© Author(s) 2019. 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-19-2965-2019

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

Articles | Volume 19, issue 5

Research article

|

07 Mar 2019

Research article |

| 07 Mar 2019

Aerosol optical properties over Europe: an evaluation of the AQMEII Phase 3 simulations against satellite observations

Laura Palacios-Peña, Pedro Jiménez-Guerrero, Rocío Baró, Alessandra Balzarini, Roberto Bianconi, Gabriele Curci, Tony Christian Landi, Guido Pirovano, Marje Prank, Angelo Riccio, Paolo Tuccella, and Stefano Galmarini

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Final revised paper (published on 07 Mar 2019)
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Preprint (discussion started on 05 Mar 2018)
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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', Anonymous Referee #2, 28 Mar 2018
RC2: 'Review Comments on the manuscript “Aerosol optical properties over Europe: an evaluation of the AQMEII Phase 3 simulations against satellite observations” submitted by Laura Palacios-Peña et al. to Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.', Anonymous Referee #3, 16 Apr 2018
AC1: 'Response to RC1 and RC2', Pedro Jimenez-Guerrero, 12 Jun 2018

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Pedro Jimenez-Guerrero on behalf of the Authors (21 Jun 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (02 Aug 2018) by Nikolaos Mihalopoulos

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (12 Aug 2018)

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (18 Aug 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Second round of review for the manuscript “Aerosol optical properties over Europe: an evaluation of the AQMEII Phase 3 simulations against satellite observations” submitted by Laura Palacios-Peña et al. to Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

General comments

The authors made a good effort to improve the manuscript by adding new material for model evaluation, as suggested during the review process. While I am still in favor of publishing the paper with ACP, my recommendation is major revision due to two main reasons: a) the objectives of the study are not met by the conclusions drawn and b) large number of grammatical errors make the paper very hard to follow and understand in depth the outcomes of this study. The revision of the paper gives the impression that it was hasty which resulted in a number of errors and omissions. The paper needs revision so that it meets the standards of ACP. The comments that follow will help the authors make specific changes, clarifications and edits.

Specific comments

The authors state the importance of their study in the introduction, giving three reasons: “1) all the regional models evaluated here were run using the same boundaries and initial conditions which permit investigate the importance of different processes and feedbacks in each models; 2) the use of two different emissions data set permits evaluated the influence of these in the aerosol optical properties representation; and 3) the use of online coupled chemistry-meteorology/climate models (as were some of the used here) will permit to investigate the influence of the ARI and ACI.”. I underlined the important outcomes that add value to the current knowledge of AOD and AE modeling but I would like to see how these are supported by the conducted analysis. This is completely missing from the conclusions and summary of this work.

The manuscript needs extensive grammatical editing. I suggest that the authors work with a professional native English speaker to make the necessary edits which are too many to be marked during this review process. Please note that this inhibits the proper understanding of concepts and conclusions and, as such, is termed very important by this reviewer. I’ll show a small example from the end of page 19 (section 4): “It shoul be pointed out the similarity between AOD values displayed by MODIS and AERONET when the simulations are evaluated in front of each one.” My guess is that the authors talk about the similarity of the AOD simulations with respect to both MODIS and AERONET, meaning model evaluation results were similar for MODIS and AERONET sites (according to the next sentence). The meaning of the sentence as it is, is very different, and in addition the phrase “in front of each one” is erroneous.

The abstract still talks about satellite measurements only, even though AERONET was included in the evaluation. The mention of satellites only is also found in other parts of the text (e.g. page 10, first paragraph).

Table 1 is not completed correctly. There are question marks included in some columns and the last column is cropped from the page. This shouldn’t have been missed in a revised submission.

Figures and figure legends need careful revision. For example, in Figure 1 and elsewhere the reference to MAN stations/datasets is not correct; it needs to mention the diamond shapes and what the colored lines represent. AERONET is misspelled in the legend of Fig.7, etc. Please make a careful revision of all tables and graphs.

In Figures 1 through 6, for some models (like IT1) and seasons, there are no results for the AERONET stations. First of all, why is this the case (the modeling domain covers all locations)? Second, how does that impact the validity of the ensemble results when one or two model outputs are used to construct the ensemble (as for AE during OND in Fig. 4)? How does that impact the PDFs and their intercomparison? All these discrepancies must be clearly described in the discussion of the results.

The explanation of the mask (10% of maximum possible occurrences) needs to be strengthened by giving an example for MODIS and for AERONET, in terms of the possible max observations versus the actual and the 10%. That might persuade the reader about how “reasonable” the selected threshold is. Otherwise, without any reference to prior work, it is totally arbitrary.

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ED: Reconsider after major revisions (27 Aug 2018) by Nikolaos Mihalopoulos

AR by Laura Palacios-Peña on behalf of the Authors (05 Oct 2018) Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (17 Nov 2018) by Nikolaos Mihalopoulos

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (27 Nov 2018)

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (30 Jan 2019)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (30 Jan 2019) by Nikolaos Mihalopoulos

AR by Laura Palacios-Peña on behalf of the Authors (31 Jan 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (13 Feb 2019) by Nikolaos Mihalopoulos

AR by Laura Palacios-Peña on behalf of the Authors (14 Feb 2019) Author's response Manuscript

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Short summary

The main uncertainties regarding the estimation of changes in the Earth’s energy budget are related to the role of atmospheric aerosols. Our study evaluates the representation of aerosol optical properties by different atmospheric chemistry models against remote-sensing observations in order to reduce this uncertainty. Results show that the representation of aerosol optical properties is strongly dependent on the used model.