On the annual variability of Antarctic aerosol size distributions at Halley Research Station

Lachlan-Cope, Thomas; Beddows, David C. S.; Brough, Neil; Jones, Anna E.; Harrison, Roy M.; Lupi, Angelo; Yoon, Young Jun; Virkkula, Aki; Dall'Osto, Manuel

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-4461-2020

Articles | Volume 20, issue 7

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-4461-2020

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-4461-2020

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

Articles | Volume 20, issue 7

Research article

|

17 Apr 2020

Research article |

| 17 Apr 2020

On the annual variability of Antarctic aerosol size distributions at Halley Research Station

Thomas Lachlan-Cope, David C. S. Beddows, Neil Brough, Anna E. Jones, Roy M. Harrison, Angelo Lupi, Young Jun Yoon, Aki Virkkula, and Manuel Dall'Osto

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Preprint (discussion started on 10 Oct 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: 'RC-acp-2019-847', Anonymous Referee #1, 21 Oct 2019
- AC1: 'reply', Manuel Dall'Osto, 17 Feb 2020
RC2: 'Review of Lachlan-Cope et al. (2019)', Anonymous Referee #2, 06 Nov 2019
- AC1: 'reply', Manuel Dall'Osto, 17 Feb 2020
RC3: 'Comments', Anonymous Referee #3, 11 Nov 2019
- AC1: 'reply', Manuel Dall'Osto, 17 Feb 2020

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Anna Wenzel on behalf of the Authors (20 Feb 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (20 Feb 2020) by Veli-Matti Kerminen

RR by Anonymous Referee #4 (05 Mar 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The revised manuscript is a greatly improved version of the original one. I have a few, mostly minor, comments to be considered before recommending acceptance for publications.

Section 3.1.1 is a single, long paragraph. The text would be better readable if spit into 2-3 individual paragraphs. It is stated that "Results are broadly in line…". One should define which results. The results of this study? Some specific results discussed earlier?

Also section 3.3 starts with a very long paragraph. To make this text more readable, I would again recommend splitting it into at least 2 paragraphs.

The authors talk about minimum of the Hoppel mode (Abstract and end of section 3.1.1). I do not think this is quite a correct way of expressing this issue. In the scientific literature, this is usually called as a Hoppel minimum, and this minimum is then located between two modes, typically between Aitken and accumulation mode.

There are a couple of small things related to sea spray aerosol in section 4.1.1. First, concerning the formation of sea salt by blowing snow, there is a very recent study (Frey et al. 2020, Atmos. Chem. Phys. 20, p. 2549) in strong direct evidence on this mechanism was obtained. This study could added to the citation list in this section. Second, I am a bit skeptical in stating that coarse sea salt give a big contribution to a CCN population. Coarse particles tend to dominate sea salt mass concentrations but, being particle larger than 2.5 um in aerosol dynamic diameter by definition, their number concentration is simply too low to give a notable contribution to CCN. I would think the sea salt/sea spray population giving the largest contribution to CNN is centered well below 1 um, and probably close to 100 nm, in diameter.

The reference list needs to be revised carefully. First, at least 3 references mentioned in the text (Draxler and Hess 1988, James 1989, Kyro 2013) are missing altogether from reference list. They might be others as well. Second, several of the references are incorrectly formatted. Please check out.

Finally, there a quite a few types in the text, especially in sections 1 and 2. Please check out the language of the very last version of the paper.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (05 Mar 2020) by Veli-Matti Kerminen

AR by Manuel Dall'Osto on behalf of the Authors (05 Mar 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (09 Mar 2020) by Veli-Matti Kerminen

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Short summary

We present a statistical cluster analysis of the physical characteristics of particle size distributions collected at Halley (Antarctica) for the year 2015. Complex interactions between multiple ecosystems, coupled with different atmospheric circulation, result in very different aerosol size distributions populating the Southern Hemisphere.