The global climatology of the intensity of the ionospheric sporadic <i>E</i> layer

Yu, Bingkun; Xue, Xianghui; Yue, Xin'an; Yang, Chengyun; Yu, Chao; Dou, Xiankang; Ning, Baiqi; Hu, Lianhuan

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-4139-2019

Articles | Volume 19, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-4139-2019

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

Special issue:

Layered phenomena in the mesopause region (ACP/AMT inter-journal...

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-4139-2019

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

Articles | Volume 19, issue 6

Research article

|

02 Apr 2019

Research article |

| 02 Apr 2019

The global climatology of the intensity of the ionospheric sporadic E layer

Bingkun Yu, Xianghui Xue, Xin'an Yue, Chengyun Yang, Chao Yu, Xiankang Dou, Baiqi Ning, and Lianhuan Hu

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Final revised paper (published on 02 Apr 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 02 Oct 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Review of acp-2018-790', Anonymous Referee #1, 31 Oct 2018
RC2: 'Reviewer comment on “The global climatology of the intensity of ionospheric sporadic E layer” by Bingkun Yu et al.', Anonymous Referee #3, 08 Jan 2019
AC1: 'Response to Reviewers', Bingkun Yu, 10 Feb 2019

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Bingkun Yu on behalf of the Authors (10 Feb 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (20 Feb 2019) by Bernd Funke

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (21 Mar 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have addressed the points raised by both reviewers in some detail. In general, they have done a good job and I think the paper is close to being ready to publish.

In the previous review I asked why they were using MSIS for atmospheric densities, and WACCM for winds. The authors' response that WACCM does not provide atmospheric densities "directly", is not really valid – a simple application of the Ideal Gas Equation with the WACCM temperature and pressure will yield a perfectly reasonable atmospheric density, which will certainly be superior to a model like MSIS which only uses actual measurements above about 150 km. The other reason given in the paper is to maintain consistency with a previous study (Chu et al. (2014)) which also used MSIS, which is not really a good reason. However, I don’t think that the differences between WACCM and MSIS densities will be large enough to cause significant changes to the sporadic E predictions in the study, so this point should not hold up publishing the present study - but something for the authors to consider in future work, especially if using the WACCM-SD version of the model.

The revised discussion at the bottom of page 8 (lines 28-32) needs to be amended. Why are the summer Es layers thinner and longer-lasting? Is this because in summer in the polar cap the atmosphere is continuously illuminated, and so ionization levels are higher? That is implied from the previous sentence but, if that is the case, then it needs to be stated here.

The discussion regarding meteoric input at the bottom of page 9 (line 30) is confusing. Plane (2012) drew attention to the wide range of estimated inputs (5-270 tonnes per day), but Carrillo-Sanchez et al (2016) narrowed this down to 43 +/- 14 t per day.

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (22 Mar 2019) by Bernd Funke

AR by Bingkun Yu on behalf of the Authors (25 Mar 2019) Manuscript

Short summary

It reports the long-term climatology of the intensity of E_s layers from COSMIC satellites. The global E_s maps present high-resolution spatial distributions and seasonal dependence. It mainly occurs at mid-latitudes and polar regions. Based on wind shear theory, simulation results indicate the convergence of vertical ion velocity could partially explain the E_s seasonal dependence and some disagreements between observations and simulations suggest other processes play roles in the E_s variations.