Examining the atmospheric radiative and snow-darkening effects of black carbon and dust across the Rocky Mountains of the United States using WRF-Chem

Rahimi, Stefan; Liu, Xiaohong; Zhao, Chun; Lu, Zheng; Lebo, Zachary J.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-10911-2020

Articles | Volume 20, issue 18

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-10911-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-10911-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 20, issue 18

Research article

|

22 Sep 2020

Research article |

| 22 Sep 2020

Examining the atmospheric radiative and snow-darkening effects of black carbon and dust across the Rocky Mountains of the United States using WRF-Chem

Stefan Rahimi, Xiaohong Liu, Chun Zhao, Zheng Lu, and Zachary J. Lebo

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Final revised paper (published on 22 Sep 2020)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 09 Jan 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of Rahimi et al', Anonymous Referee #1, 26 Jan 2020
- AC3: 'RC1 response', Stefan Rahimi-Esfarjani, 19 Jun 2020
RC2: 'Review of Rahimi et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 30 Apr 2020
- AC2: 'RC2 response', Stefan Rahimi-Esfarjani, 19 Jun 2020
AC1: 'RC1 response', Stefan Rahimi-Esfarjani, 19 Jun 2020

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Stefan Rahimi-Esfarjani on behalf of the Authors (19 Jun 2020) Author's response

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (07 Jul 2020) by Federico Fierli

RR by Hans-Werner Jacobi (17 Jul 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

In my opinion the authors did a very good job to address the major concerns expressed in my initial report. Including the appendices is a very good approach making the manuscript easier to read. Some appendices may even be moved to the supplement (e.g. A1 or A5) to reduce the length of the manuscript? The authors may further consider the suggestions for technical corrections below.

Rockies should be replaced by Rocky Mountains throughout the manuscript.

Chapter 2.5 Observational data: It is difficult to see in Fig. 1, but I assume that most of the IMPROVE observations are from relatively low elevation sites? Maybe the range of elevation of the used IMPROVE sites could be mentioned in the last paragraph of this chapter. This may be important since the bias between observed and simulated BC and dust may be higher at higher elevations.

L. 599: “…[dust] is still underpredicted by 43%.”

Some sentences are somewhat awkward and should be revised, e.g. line 558 “Larger, more dust aerosols dim sunlight, effectuating a negative surface RE.”, line 554 “Only in Greater Idaho is CNT able to explicitly meltout snow;… “, line 565 “…move up the meltout date by 4 days.”, line 566ff “Painter et al. (2007) simulated a dust SDE that melted snowpack completely more than 20 days earlier than a simulation without dust-snow-albedo effects, a result of much larger magnitude than ours.”, line 588 “However, by (3), it is clear that..”, or line 662 “… dust ARI could actually incite a positive surface RE.”

Typo in line 563: “…between SDE and ARI shifts”

L. 779ff: “The differences between CNT and NOCHEM, as well as their deficiencies, should be kept in mind when interpreting the results of the study. However, an evaluation of their differences is beyond the scope of this study.”

Caption of Figure S1: Use the same denominations for the four sub-regions as in the rest of the manuscript and the supplement.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (26 Jul 2020)

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (07 Aug 2020) by Federico Fierli

AR by Stefan Rahimi-Esfarjani on behalf of the Authors (11 Aug 2020) Author's response Manuscript

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Short summary

Dark particles emitted to the atmosphere can absorb sunlight and heat the air. As these particles settle, they may darken the surface, especially over snow-covered regions like the Rocky Mountains. This darkening of the surface may lead to changes in snowpack, affecting the local meteorology and hydrology. We seek to evaluate whether these light-absorbing particles more prominently affect this region through their atmospheric presence or their on-snow presence.