Is the near-spherical shape the “new black” for smoke?

Gialitaki, Anna; Tsekeri, Alexandra; Amiridis, Vassilis; Ceolato, Romain; Paulien, Lucas; Kampouri, Anna; Gkikas, Antonis; Solomos, Stavros; Marinou, Eleni; Haarig, Moritz; Baars, Holger; Ansmann, Albert; Lapyonok, Tatyana; Lopatin, Anton; Dubovik, Oleg; Groß, Silke; Wirth, Martin; Tsichla, Maria; Tsikoudi, Ioanna; Balis, Dimitris

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-14005-2020

Articles | Volume 20, issue 22

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-14005-2020

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

Special issue:

EARLINET aerosol profiling: contributions to atmospheric and...

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-14005-2020

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

Articles | Volume 20, issue 22

Research article

|

19 Nov 2020

Research article |

| 19 Nov 2020

Is the near-spherical shape the “new black” for smoke?

Anna Gialitaki, Alexandra Tsekeri, Vassilis Amiridis, Romain Ceolato, Lucas Paulien, Anna Kampouri, Antonis Gkikas, Stavros Solomos, Eleni Marinou, Moritz Haarig, Holger Baars, Albert Ansmann, Tatyana Lapyonok, Anton Lopatin, Oleg Dubovik, Silke Groß, Martin Wirth, Maria Tsichla, Ioanna Tsikoudi, and Dimitris Balis

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Final revised paper (published on 19 Nov 2020)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 19 Feb 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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SC1: 'Comments and questions', Michael Fromm, 17 Mar 2020
- AC4: 'Response to Dr. Fromm', Anna Gialitaki, 16 Jul 2020
RC1: 'Review of "Is the near–spherical shape the “new black” for smoke?"', Anonymous Referee #3, 17 Mar 2020
- AC1: 'Response to Anonymous Referee #3', Anna Gialitaki, 16 Jul 2020
RC2: 'Review - Is the near-spherical shape the new black for smoke?', Anonymous Referee #2, 19 Mar 2020
- AC2: 'Response to Anonymous Referee #2', Anna Gialitaki, 16 Jul 2020
RC3: 'Review of "Is the near-spherical shape the new black for smoke?"', Anonymous Referee #1, 22 Apr 2020
- AC3: 'Response to Anonymous Referee #1', Anna Gialitaki, 16 Jul 2020

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Anna Gialitaki on behalf of the Authors (16 Jul 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (22 Jul 2020) by Eduardo Landulfo

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (04 Aug 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Review of "Is the near–spherical shape the “new black” for smoke? " by Gialitaki et al.

General comments:

In my opinion, the manuscript has been significantly improved. This is an interesting study and well described, and now is an enjoyable read. Most of my concerns were addressed satisfactorily. I have a lingering concern about the conclusion stated in the abstract that "the near spherical shape (or closely similar shapes) is the only morphology found capable of reproducing the observ[ations]", which still appears to be overstated, for the same reason as discussed in the first review (Reviewer #3). Indeed it looks like perhaps you may have simply forgotten to update the abstract, since it is substantially the same as the first version although there are many important revisions in the paper. I suggest revising the abstract, and to make it easy, you could take your new Conclusions section as a guide. Specifically, please remove the implication that more complicated morphologies cannot reproduce the measurements (because you didn't test coating models which most likely can reproduce them, at the cost of greater complexity) either by deleting that sentence or rewording it to be clearer what was and wasn't tested. You might want to consider highlighting the AERONET-related calculations in the abstract. Also, you might want to highlight the newness of performing microphysical retrievals of any kind on measurements that include depolarization at 3 wavelengths.

Other than that, I have only very minor suggestions about wording in a few isolated sentences:

page 1, line 22, change "showing" to "and show" (to make it clear that this phrase refers to "the results presented here" not "recent findings in the literature")

page 2, line 30, change "cell" to "coating"

page 3, line 5, change "circumscription" to "circumscribing"

page 4, line 14, I suggest inserting "more complicated Chebyshev particle shapes" to be more specific

page 5, line 15, I suggest adding "whereas the values observed in this case are mostly between ____ and _____" to the end of the sentence that points out that cloud PLDR is usually > 40%.

The reference for Ohneiser et al. 2020 (called out at page 8, line 30 and elsewhere) appears to be missing in the references section.

page 9, line 13, I suggest being more specific by changing the end of the sentence to be something like "ten solutions which reproduce the measurements to within the measurement uncertainty"

Table 2 caption, I don't think the statement "all the observations" is really correct. That is,there are other cases in literature with high PLDR dating all the way back to at least Murayama et al (2004) ,including some you mention in the introduction. Please reword to explain what other criteria you are thinking of. Do you mean observations that include 355 nm? Something else?

Figure 7 caption seems to refer to an earlier version of the figure. Please revise.

Figure 9 caption. Please mention the error bars in the caption. Also please consider replacing "simulations ... for various values" with more specific information, i.e. "the solutions given in Table 3 that reproduce the measurements within the measurement uncertainty"

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RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (09 Aug 2020)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (17 Aug 2020) by Eduardo Landulfo

AR by Anna Gialitaki on behalf of the Authors (27 Aug 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (14 Sep 2020) by Eduardo Landulfo

AR by Anna Gialitaki on behalf of the Authors (24 Sep 2020) Author's response Manuscript

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Short summary

Stratospheric smoke particles are found to significantly depolarize incident light, while this effect is also accompanied by a strong spectral dependence. We utilize scattering simulations to show that this behaviour can be attributed to the near-spherical shape of the particles. We also examine whether an extension of the current AERONET scattering model to include the near-spherical shapes could be of benefit to the AERONET retrieval for stratospheric smoke associated with enhanced PLDR.