The paper "new particle formation leads to CCN at the Antarctic Peninsula" aim to present one year of data (2018) of SMPS data and to connect it with CCN data.

I am not sure if there is a contribution at this stage. Similar and much in depth results were published from Jang et al 2019 and Kim et al 2019 on part A part B of ACP. This paper stresses the importance of the ocean, but the air mass classification and the SMPS data analysis is too weak to draw any further conclusion, I am not sure if this paper add anything new to the literature for a high impact journal like ACP.

The paper also suffers from a poor literature review, totally unbalanced - it somehow reminds controversial marine organic aerosol topics discussed twenty years ago, with few respected scientists arguing over POC-DOC and the effect of organics on the sea spray production (still not solved!).

(1) Introduction - poorly presented, it cites one paper (Kyro et al 2013) stressing the importance of Antarctic melt ponds waters, purely speculative and not shown in any data, only suggested as a possibility - remote, I would say; if you have an idea of the overall geography of the Antarctic continent and marine surrounding. The paper continue to report papers about animals and emissions, although from studies run very close to emission sources (indeed the island is called Bird island).

What is even funnier is that the authors do not mention any of recent open ocean and coastal Antarctic expeditions (i.e. PEGASO, ACE Schmale Baccarini et al, PI-ICE) - that is funny, cause some of the authors were even on board of such cruises (and continue publishing data - without the PIs involved - from such cruises). Overall it is a pity in 2023 these things are still happening - I suggest to write a better and more fair introduction. Also, recent papers published by Australian groups talking about Antarctica and CCN may be worth mentioning and consider in the discussion. At this stage the paper is about a report of measurements.

(2) BC data. Not sure if this is all necessary - if you want to compare other data, consider to compare Antarctic station or Arctic station, mentioning Mace Head is a "little" bit out of scope here. It is evident that marine Atlantic aerosols has nothing to do with Antarctic - consider remove all this section for eventually a future publication elsewhere.

(3) Definition of different events - beside the dozens of papers discussing different types of nucleation with K-means clustering, do not you have better examples than the ones presented? Out of the 97 NPF events, you may want to have a look at what you presented:

Figure 6 - is this a NPF event or did you by mistake add a wrong figure? Given you comment it in the text, I assume this is the right figure. I am not sure this is a NPF event, it looks to me it is a background mode of about 20nm that is existing in a large area, it reminds what was discussed in O´Dowd et al (GRL, 2010) and in other papers of open ocean slow growing ultrafine particles. What I am not sure is that if there particles are growing in Figure 6, it looks to me they stay there, and they were detected as a background small Aikten (20-30nm) mode - could be primary or secondary or something interesting, surely not a "tyipcal" NPF for a marine case I would say.

Figure 7 The second may be a NPF event, the first one is a little bit a burst, of 30 min, followed by a 20-30nm mode lasting for several hours -  I suggest to look for better examples or to use a more detailed classication

Figure 8 are these data in local time? Please define the time, it looks this is a night time nucleation event?

(4) classification of air masses. Please consider to discuss different types of environment and to discuss it well, especially cause there are marine simpagic and pelagic zones, including the consolidated pack sea ice and the sea ice marginal zone. All these environments are more complex than a simple ocean - sea ice area. I suggest a better analysis, perhaps using a clustering method such us the one presented in Jang 2022 (Science of the Total Environment 803 (2022) 150002). The study of Jang et al 2022 also stress that EAP and WAP are main sources of ultrafine particles (10-25nm) so in contrast to what this current study suggests.

The current paper aims to give a clear message: it is all marine open ocean and little sea ice. This is in contrast with the literature, and recent studies (Jang 2022). Unfortunately the previous studies, Jang 2019 part 1 and part 2 did not consider sea ice air masses, and only partially presented data showing only data from open ocean seas from the north. I suggest a more in depth analysis, at the moment this is a qualitative analysis showing some very broad classifications of both air masses and NPF events with a broad terminology - broadly concluding the identical results published before from a much bigger dataset (2009 till 2016) with both SMPS and CCN data.

(5) Wind roses or potential source function analysis to prove and or exclude local sources as suggested by reviewer 1.

I suggest to publish this paper in a lower impact journal or in measurement report.