Quantifying the sensitivity of aerosol optical properties to the parameterizations of physico-chemical processes during the 2010 Russian wildfires and heatwave

Palacios-Peña, Laura; Stier, Philip; Lorente-Plazas, Raquel; Jiménez-Guerrero, Pedro

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-9679-2020

Articles | Volume 20, issue 16

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-9679-2020

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-9679-2020

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

Articles | Volume 20, issue 16

Research article

|

18 Aug 2020

Research article |

| 18 Aug 2020

Quantifying the sensitivity of aerosol optical properties to the parameterizations of physico-chemical processes during the 2010 Russian wildfires and heatwave

Laura Palacios-Peña, Philip Stier, Raquel Lorente-Plazas, and Pedro Jiménez-Guerrero

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Final revised paper (published on 18 Aug 2020)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 11 Mar 2020)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Review of the manuscript by Palacios-Peña et al. submitted to the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.', Anonymous Referee #1, 30 Mar 2020
RC2: 'reviewer-comments', Anonymous Referee #2, 03 Apr 2020
AC1: 'Authors response', Laura Palacios-Peña, 17 Jun 2020

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Anna Wenzel on behalf of the Authors (19 Jun 2020) Author's response

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (19 Jun 2020) by Jianzhong Ma

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (26 Jun 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The revised manuscript by Palacios-Peña et al. is significantly better than the first submission. The authors replied to my comments in a satisfactory manner and they revised the manuscript accordingly. However, the manuscript requires a thorough language check and proof reading before it can be published.

Here are some examples of the places where the language needs the checked (line numbers from the manuscript with mark-up) and a couple of minor comments:

line 224: “this” → the

line 230: “has lower absolute differences are lower” → has lower absolute differences

line 258: This discussion is still a bit confusing for me. The authors state that “It is noticeable that LR values over the MIN-AOD location (close to 30 sr −1 ) are not comparable to those values expected by the scientific literature are (e.g Mielonen et al., 2013).” However, in Figure 5., which presents the LR profile for the MIN-AOD location, most simulations show similar LRs (above 60 sr-1) as reported by Mielonen et al. (2013), only the NO_DD simulation shows low LR values (closer to 40 sr-1 than 30 sr-1) so to me it seems that the simulated LRs are too high for a region which is not heavily affected by the smoke. The authors should check this analysis and clarify the text accordingly.

line 277: “change of each magnitude”, what do you mean with magnitude? Please, clarify.

Line 302: “not as higher” → not as high

line 406: “how a peak” → show a peak

line 425: “These differences in the shape profiles could be attributed to these species are not directly emitted over MIN-AOD and Moscow areas and transport processes could be influenced by vertical distribution.” This is a very confusing sentence. Do you mean something like this: These differences in the shapes of the profiles could be attributed to species which are not directly emitted over the MIN-AOD and Moscow areas thus, the vertical distribution could be influenced by transport processes.

Line 428: This discussion section is a good addition but the language needs to be checked thoroughly. Currently, the text is quite hard to follow. In addition, the authors should clarify what is the take-home-message of this discussion. Which processes cause the largest uncertainty in ARI and ACI estimates? There are a lot of processes with big uncertainties but which of them have the biggest impact on the evaluation of aerosol climate effects and/or which of them have the largest knowledge gaps? This is a huge topic to discuss and I don’t mean that the authors should go through all the details and try to compare numbers which are not directly comparable but I would like to have a bit better context for these findings, especially on the magnitude of the impact these uncertainties cause to our estimates of AOD.

line 440: “influenced by the latter” or do you mean “ influenced by the former”?

Line 450: What is this “CCN uncertainty”?

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (26 Jun 2020) by Jianzhong Ma

AR by Laura Palacios-Peña on behalf of the Authors (30 Jun 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (13 Jul 2020) by Jianzhong Ma

AR by Laura Palacios-Peña on behalf of the Authors (14 Jul 2020) Author's response Manuscript

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Short summary

It is widely known that the impact of aerosol–radiation and aerosol–cloud interactions on the radiative forcing is subject to large uncertainties. This is mainly due to the lack of understanding of aerosol optical properties and vertical distribution, whose uncertainties come from different processes. This work attempts to quantify the sensitivity of aerosol optical properties and their vertical distribution to key physico-chemical processes.