Complex plant-derived organic aerosol as ice-nucleating particles – more than the sums of their parts?

Steinke, Isabelle; Hiranuma, Naruki; Funk, Roger; Höhler, Kristina; Tüllmann, Nadine; Umo, Nsikanabasi Silas; Weidler, Peter G.; Möhler, Ottmar; Leisner, Thomas

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-11387-2020

Articles | Volume 20, issue 19

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-11387-2020

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-11387-2020

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

Articles | Volume 20, issue 19

Research article

|

06 Oct 2020

Research article |

| 06 Oct 2020

Complex plant-derived organic aerosol as ice-nucleating particles – more than the sums of their parts?

Isabelle Steinke, Naruki Hiranuma, Roger Funk, Kristina Höhler, Nadine Tüllmann, Nsikanabasi Silas Umo, Peter G. Weidler, Ottmar Möhler, and Thomas Leisner

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Final revised paper (published on 06 Oct 2020)
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Preprint (discussion started on 11 Nov 2019)
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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 for Steinke et al.: "Complex plant-derived organic aerosol as ice-nucleating particles – more than a sum of their parts?"', Anonymous Referee #1, 13 Dec 2019
RC2: 'Review of ACPD Steinke et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 20 Jan 2020
AC1: 'Reply to reviewers' comments', Isabelle Steinke, 12 Mar 2020

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Isabelle Steinke on behalf of the Authors (07 Apr 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (09 Apr 2020) by Hinrich Grothe

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (27 Apr 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Review of the revised version of “Complex plant-derived organic aerosol as ice-nucleating
particles – more than a sum of their parts?” by Steinke et al., submitted to ACPD

This revised version has improved, compared to the original version. However, I have a few remaining remarks. The related adaptions are likely easily done and once they are incorporated, as far as I am concerned, the manuscript can be considered for publication in ACP.

(Line numbers in the following refer to the version with the tracked changes.)

1) In the abstract, while cellulose is cited as “has been suggested by recent studies as a proxy for quantifying the primary cloud ice formation caused by particles originating from vegetation”, it is still not mentioned at all that biological particles are likely to play a much larger role, at least at higher freezing temperatures (> 258 K, maybe even further down). Your examinations go up into this temperature range and therefore mentioning them in the abstract helps to prevent that readers of your text in the future will ignore these important contributors so atmospheric INP.

2) The new text starting in line 58 (“Agricultural …”) should be started a bit differently so that it fits to the flow of the text before. The motivation here is that this “missing source of INPs …” could be found in agricultural dust, as far as I understand it.

3) Line 121: Add “area” between “surface” and “based”.

4) The new text starting in line 145 fits better to the next section (2.3), as this is important for the determination of the surface area.

5) Line 169 ff: You argue that sedimentation is negligible. But later in the text, for one sample, you even argue with sedimentation to explain the observed difference. And I agree with your later argument. But that also means that issues with a wrongly estimated surface area can be expected to contribute more to potential deviations between different methods than the redistribution of soluble material. In order to not give a wrong impression, "negligible" should not be said here! I suggest to delete the part of the sentence with “negligible” in it and reformulate it to -> "But to understand the full effect, more future studies are needed."

6) Line 161: Add a “to” between “lead” and “differences”.

7) Line 297-298 and Fig. 3: Do you mean Fig. 3 in line 297? (Otherwise I am confused and revisions in the description of Fig. 2 and related text would be needed.)

Even if you mean Fig. 3 here, I am still a bit concerned as this scaling down seems a bit arbitrary. And Fig. 3 has not changed between the first submission and now, so I wonder if this scaling down was already done in the first version, or if Fig. 3 has really not changed? Are these scaling numbers based on any scientific evidence that can be cited here? That would improve the message of the work substantially.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (27 Apr 2020) by Hinrich Grothe

AR by Isabelle Steinke on behalf of the Authors (22 May 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (05 Jun 2020) by Hinrich Grothe

AR by Isabelle Steinke on behalf of the Authors (30 Jun 2020) Manuscript

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Short summary

In this study, we highlight the potential impact of particles from certain terrestrial sources on the formation of ice crystals in clouds. In particular, we focus on biogenic particles consisting of various organic compounds, which makes it very difficult to predict the ice nucleation properties of complex ambient particles. We find that these ambient particles are often more ice active than individual components.