Ice-nucleating particles in a coastal tropical site

Ladino, Luis A.; Raga, Graciela B.; Alvarez-Ospina, Harry; Andino-Enríquez, Manuel A.; Rosas, Irma; Martínez, Leticia; Salinas, Eva; Miranda, Javier; Ramírez-Díaz, Zyanya; Figueroa, Bernardo; Chou, Cedric; Bertram, Allan K.; Quintana, Erika T.; Maldonado, Luis A.; García-Reynoso, Agustín; Si, Meng; Irish, Victoria E.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-6147-2019

Articles | Volume 19, issue 9

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-6147-2019

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-6147-2019

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

Articles | Volume 19, issue 9

Research article

|

09 May 2019

Research article |

| 09 May 2019

Ice-nucleating particles in a coastal tropical site

Luis A. Ladino, Graciela B. Raga, Harry Alvarez-Ospina, Manuel A. Andino-Enríquez, Irma Rosas, Leticia Martínez, Eva Salinas, Javier Miranda, Zyanya Ramírez-Díaz, Bernardo Figueroa, Cedric Chou, Allan K. Bertram, Erika T. Quintana, Luis A. Maldonado, Agustín García-Reynoso, Meng Si, and Victoria E. Irish

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Final revised paper (published on 09 May 2019)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 06 Dec 2018)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'looking forward to more in-depth analysis', Anonymous Referee #1, 21 Dec 2018
RC2: 'need major improvement', Anonymous Referee #3, 11 Jan 2019
RC3: 'Review for acp-2018-1215', Anonymous Referee #4, 15 Jan 2019
RC4: 'Review_acp-2018-1215', Anonymous Referee #5, 31 Jan 2019
AC1: 'Authors' response to all referee comments', Luis Antonio Ladino, 13 Mar 2019

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Luis A. Ladino on behalf of the Authors (14 Mar 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (20 Mar 2019) by Paul Zieger

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (26 Mar 2019)

RR by Anonymous Referee #4 (01 Apr 2019)

RR by Anonymous Referee #5 (11 Apr 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Ladino et al., have thoroughly satisfied my comments and their manuscript contributes a valuable analysis and dataset for the ice nucleation community. I think the paper should be accepted for publication after addressing the following mostly minor comments.

Minor comments:
L57: “important oceanic sources of INPs” suggest change to “important oceanic source of INPs”
L105/figure1: could a label be added for Sisal for those not as familiar with the geography of this region?
L124: “… photodetector that convert it…” change to “…photodetector that converts it…”
L170: can the authors expand on the correction factor (fne)? Is this determine each run or for each study? What range of factors are used? Is this a passion counting statistic uncertainty?
L174: I think the detection limits of the MOUDI-DFT need to be included in the methods description also (rather than just the Figure 4 caption). This is an important distinction from other measurements shown on Figure 4. That is, there may be [INP] present at Sisal that are below or above the instrument’s detection limit, so it’s not a very good direct comparison at all temperatures. E.g., DeMott et al., reported measurements less than 0.0001 L-1, but those are not measurable by the MOUDI-DFT.
L257: typo: “different aire mass”
L263: I think there may be a formatting issue here for the mean number concentrations
:272: Any precipitation from these frontal passages? This may be another explanation for lower concentrations and suppressed diurnal cycle.
L276: This is typically written in all caps (HYSPLIT)
L289: “..during the passage of the cold fronts” should be “…during the passage of Cold Front B” I think.
Figure 3: Should the start time be 00:00 h local time? The xlabels suggest that the start time was midnight?
L290: sentence contains grammatical error?
Figure S4 – Are these 24 hour averages? Perhaps add this detail to the figure caption.
L292: suggest change to: “Note, however, that this is not a completely fair comparison given that sampling time for the chemical analysis was 48 h, while sampling time for determining the influence of the cold front air masses on INP populations was on the order of 36 hours. Therefore, the periods denoted as cold fronts contain aerosol particles that may not technically correspond to cold front air masses.” (or something like this)
Figure 4: “Summary of INP concentrations” suggest change to “Summary of average INP concentrations”; what are the vertical lines for the grey points, 1 standard deviation? As a suggestion to highlight the number of samples and work that was included in this project, I would pull each of the values from Figure S6 into Figure 4 as lighter colors. There is a lot of data here, and it could be lost if all just placed in the supplemental.
Table 1 – could move this to supplemental I think.
Figure 6. It’s very difficult to see the uncertainty bars on Figure 6D. could change to black bars?
L324: Maybe specify that Kolby is “central plains/agricultural”
L350: “Additionally, the chemical composition of the aerosol particles collected by Rosinski et al. (1988) indicate that the air masses in the GoM in July-August 350 were significantly influenced by mineral dust particles.” – wouldn’t presence of dust support Rosinski’s [INP] to be higher than [INP] from this study? Later the authors mention that the aerosol particles in cold front air masses are likely a mixture of particles from US Central Plains and the GoM – could this be a difference between these measurements and those by Rosinski?
Figure 7 – suggested change: “influence of the cold fronts (CF)”.
L405: what kind of organics? Secondary organic aerosol? Bioparticles are organic.

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ED: Reconsider after major revisions (18 Apr 2019) by Paul Zieger

Dear authors,

Thank you very much for the revised manuscript and detailed reply to the referees. After a second read and given the fact that one reviewer has recommended a "rejection", I have decided to reconsider your manuscript after major revisions. It will not be much work. Nevertheless, I strongly encourage you to have a close look at the detailed comments from the reviewers and my side (see below). Please take especial care in sharpening your conclusions.

Kind regards

Paul Zieger.

Comments:
• Line 3, page 1: Why only ”mid- and high-latitude” oceans? There is no reason why other oceans shouldn’t release material that can act as INP. Suggest to delete ”mid- and high-latitude”
• Line 5, page 1: Delete ”the” before oceans.
• Line 37, page 2: Can a reference from 1976 still be part of a current debate? Suggest to reformulate this sentence.
• Line 99, page 4 and throughout the manuscript: The geographic abbreviations (N, W) should not be in italics (remove the Latex mathmode).
• Line 109, page 4: For completeness, add “(arithmetic mean ±standard deviation)”
• Line 129, page 5: Please mention that these are “optical diameters”. Is the cut-size the upper, lower or mid-bin size? I guess the last bin counts all particles larger than 25 micron?
• Line 137, page 5: Please precise the size ranges of the different stages. I guess the first one is “>10 micrometer”, the second one “10-5.6 micrometer”, etc.? See also line 156.
• Equation 1, line 166 and later in the manuscript: The subscripts in the equation or of variables in generals should not be in italics. Add “\rm” in the parenthesis (e.g. A_{\rm deposit}). Instead of “ln” use “\ln” since this is a function.
• Line 254, 255 and also later in the manuscript: The capitalization of the section headings suddenly changes compared to previous headings … Please harmonize.
• Line 258, page 8 and throughout the manuscript: Within the sentence the word figure should be “Fig.” while “Figure” when it is at the beginning of the sentence. Please have a look at https://www.atmospheric-chemistry-and-physics.net/for_authors/manuscript_preparation.html and carefully fulfil the manuscript preparation requirements.
• Line 273, page 9: “than” -> “that”, add “the” before “cold”
• Line 276, page 9: “Hysplit” -> “HYSPLIT”, move “from the measurement site” to the front “Back-trajectories from the measurement site …”
• Line 296, page 9: I suggest to remove the parenthesis “([INP])” from the heading title, it should be defined within the text (as has been done before).
• Line 400, page 12: O’Dowd
• Line 415, page 13: Good correlation with what exactly? INP concentration?
• Line 460, page 14: Add “collected” or “sampled” before “around Sisal”.
• Line 466, page 14: Maybe better: “… using the same type of INP counter.” I would also start the issue of the influence of the cold fronts in a new sentence.
• Line 468, “than” -> “that”
• Line 473: Better: “However, the concentrations of Al, Si, …”
• Line 476: “magnesium” -> “Mg” (to be consistent)
• Page 14 & 15: Large parts of the conclusions, especially the last three paragraphs, are more a discussion than a precisely formulated conclusion and should be moved to Sect. 3 (Results and Discussion).
• A statement on the data availability is missing (see https://www.atmospheric-chemistry-and-physics.net/about/data_policy.html).
• Table 1: Also add the acronyms for HLPC and XRF.
• Table 2: Please add a column showing how many sample points are being compared here.

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AR by Luis A. Ladino on behalf of the Authors (22 Apr 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (24 Apr 2019) by Paul Zieger

AR by Luis A. Ladino on behalf of the Authors (24 Apr 2019) Manuscript

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Short summary

This study presents results obtained during a field campaign conducted in the tropical village of Sisal located on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Air masses arriving in Sisal during the passage of cold fronts have surprisingly higher ice-nucleating particle (INP) concentrations than the campaign average. The high concentrations of INPs at T > −15 C and the supermicron size of the INPs suggest that biological particles may have been a significant contributor to the INP population in Sisal.