Editor review on the paper “Investigations of New Particle Formation mechanisms and aerosol processes at the Marambio Station, Antarctic Peninsula” by Quéléver et al.

Since the second referee report is still missing, I will provide a review so that the open discussion can be closed. Quéléver et al. present an extensive study on new particle formation using data derived during a measurement campaign at Marambio station in 2018. The paper is generally well written and I only have suggestions for minor revisions.

Generally:

For the next submission it would be good if you could use the ACP manuscript style (line spacing, font size etc. See templates on the ACP webpage: https://www.atmospheric-chemistry-and-physics.net/submission.html#manuscriptcomposition). The manuscript was as it was published as preprint quite difficult to read (e.g. too small font).

Line numbering: On the first few pages you start numbering again with each page, but the second half of the manuscript the numbering continues until the end. Should be done one or the other way, but not mixed. Also here I would suggest to check the ACP guidelines which is the correct style.

Specific comments:

Abstract: The abstract is quite long and my impression is that you go between L36 and L41 too much into detail. I am not sure if it is really necessary to list here all the numbers. I would suggest to rather do that in the summary and shorten these lines here in the abstract.

P3, L21: “sufficiently away from the station…….”. Add here why. I assume it’s to avoid that the measurements are affected by the station. Would be good to clearly state this.

P5, L12: Add here “by collision and coalescence”, so that it reads ”are lost to pre-existing particles by collision and coalescence” to be more precise.

P5, L24: Also here I would suggest to add bit more information. How accurate is the approach by Kulmala et al. (2022)?

P7, L28: Why these numbers? Why do you pick these size ranges? An explanation/justification is missing.

P8, L10-11: Sentence not clear. Please rephrase.

P13, Fig. 6 and according text: This kind of analyses is new for me and I could not follow what actually the mass defect is and would you try to extract from it. Some more motivation/explanations are required.

P14, L116: I have difficulties to follow you. To what is the “high intensity” referring to?

P14, L133: orange dots? To which figure are you referring to? Figure 6?

P14, L140: Yellow and green dots? Same here. To which figure are you referring to?

P14, L143-147: Sentence not clear. Please rephrase. Maybe it’s better to split this sentence into two and check the grammar.

P15, L162: Add “aerosols” so that it reads “sea salt aerosols”?

Technical corrections:

P2, L4: Ipcc → IPCC

P2, L5: Add a reference?

P2, L28ff: To my knowledge this are not the only references on these aerosol compositions, thus I would suggest to add “e.g.” before the references.

P3, L1-10: I would suggest to add here references to the respective chapters.

P5, L49: aera → area

P7, Fig 2 caption: here “a)” etc in bold face instead of “(a)” as normal text. Be consistent and check ACP guidelines for which way of writing should be used.

P7, L23: changed → changes

P7, L25: appear → appeared

P8, L33: particle → particles

P11, L39: concentration → concentrations

P11, L42: add “is” so that it reads “that IA is even anticorrelated with…...”

P11, L46: concentration → concentrations

P11, L47: concentration → concentrations

P11, 3.3.2 Header: Study case of → case study on

P13, L104: noise to signal → signal to noise

P14, L124: rate → rates

P14, L134: Add “the” → have shown the possible roles

P15, L192: Add “the” → in the Supplementary

P16, L213: concentration → concentrations

P17, L221: emission → emissions

P17, L236: study case → case study

P17, L238: pathway proceeds → pathways proceeds

P17, L240: than negative → than the negative

P17, L241: should → could

P17, L246: in CLOUD-chamber CERN → in the CLOUD-chamber CERN

P17, L247: Add “that” and use plural: indicate that very high concentrations

P18, L299: in turns → in turn

P18, L299: source → sources

P18, L308: “by key well known”? “key” obsolete?

 I congratulate the authors for the excellent paper, this is a ground breaking paper with lots of excellent measurements.

I suggest publication on ACP following minor revisions:

1) The authors seem not to give importance to sympagic sea ice areas as a source of organic nitrogen, as discussed in Dall´Osto et al (2017), Dall´Osto et al (2019) and Rinaldi et al (2020) - given the fact it is a likely source of an important gaseous precursors, it may be worth to bring it into discussions

2) Following this, I am afraid the discussion on point 4 on page 17 is somehow hard to follow. The authors report 13 nucleation events: event 1 and 3 have high GR, event 6,9,10 have very high J. The authors then decide to reports an important case study for the last day (event 12 and 13). However, the discussion of the wind roses is rather weak. The whole interesting event of the case study event (high organic nitrogen) has the opposite wind roses of the claimed pinguin colonies. Also, event 6,7,8,9 have contrasting wind roses - so there must be some influence from the contrary sector (again coincidentally open pack sea ice regions around Marambio).

Following the points above, please consider to address other possible source regions. On this regards, you may want to consider to run concentration weitghted trajection for particle formation rate or to see where these particles may originate - the dataset is a brilliant one and worth analyzing a bit more in detail. Also, only one mass defect plot is presented (Figure 6). This is unusual, on previous papers (ie Antarctic measurements in Jokinen et al., 2018) mass defect api-tof measurements for each NPF events were presente - may be worth reporting them in supporting information

I congratulate once again for the brilliant dataset produced and the well presented paper, I hope these modifications can be considered before accepting the paper.