Ice injected into the tropopause by deep convection – Part 1: In the austral convective tropics

Dion, Iris-Amata; Ricaud, Philippe; Haynes, Peter; Carminati, Fabien; Dauhut, Thibaut

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-6459-2019

Articles | Volume 19, issue 9

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-6459-2019

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-6459-2019

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

Articles | Volume 19, issue 9

Research article

|

16 May 2019

Research article |

| 16 May 2019

Ice injected into the tropopause by deep convection – Part 1: In the austral convective tropics

Iris-Amata Dion, Philippe Ricaud, Peter Haynes, Fabien Carminati, and Thibaut Dauhut

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Final revised paper (published on 16 May 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 30 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 Dion et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 24 Nov 2018
- AC1: 'Responses to the referee #1', Iris-Amata Dion, 31 Jan 2019
RC2: 'Review of Dion et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 07 Dec 2018
- AC2: 'Responses to the referee #2', Iris-Amata Dion, 31 Jan 2019

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Iris-Amata Dion on behalf of the Authors (31 Jan 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (20 Feb 2019) by Rolf Müller

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (06 Mar 2019)

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (08 Mar 2019)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (18 Mar 2019) by Rolf Müller

Dear Authors,

based on your revised version and based on the reviewers comments, I am happy to
accept your paper subject to minor revisions. There is one remaining comment
by referee #2 which I would ask you to consider in your revised/final version of your paper
(it was only contained in the comments to the editor, not in the comments to the authors).

One detail: l. 23: "diurnal amount" is unclear. Do you mean " diurnal cycle of injection"?

Greetings

Rolf

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Original comment:
4) line 127 ‘The MLS IWC sensitivity thresholds do not allow to detect low ice content such as cirrus outflow associated with convective events. MLS IWC sensitivity will mostly be able to detect ice from convective cores. Following Livesey et al. (2017), we will not consider IWC measurements less than 0.02 mg m−3.’

Comment: All the thin cirrus are missed. How does that impact the results ?

Answer:
This sentence was not clear enough and have been changed. The detection limit of MariCont
ice concentration is 0.02 mg/m-3 in the TL whatever the origin/source of ice: convective cores or
cirrus associated with convective events. Thus, cirrus are not missed.
The new sentence l. 127 is now l.135:
The MLS IWC sensitivity thresholds are 0.1 mg
m −3 in the UT and 0.02 mg m −3 in the TL (Livesey et al., 2017) and will imply a small
under-estimation of the IWC measured values.
Furthermore, we changed according the detection limits values in the Tables
2 and 3.

New comment: The IWC in the UT and TL can go down to 10-3 -10-4 mg/m3 (see Krämer et al., 2016, ACP, their Figure 2). So ‘small under-estimation’ is formulated too modest, since many cirrus are missed.

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AR by Iris-Amata Dion on behalf of the Authors (21 Mar 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (17 Apr 2019) by Rolf Müller

AR by Iris-Amata Dion on behalf of the Authors (23 Apr 2019) Manuscript

Short summary

Water vapour and ice cirrus clouds near the tropical tropopause layer (TTL) have a strong radiative impact on climate. Based on space-borne observations, we have developed a model linking ice in the upper troposphere from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) to precipitation in the troposphere from the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM). Our study quantifies the amount of ice injected into the TTL by deep convection over tropical lands and oceans by investigating the diurnal cycle of ice.