Articles | Volume 25, issue 19 
            
                
                    
            
            
            
        https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-12657-2025
                    © Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
                Toxic dust emission from drought-exposed lake beds – a new air pollution threat from dried lakes
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- Final revised paper (published on 10 Oct 2025)
- Supplement to the final revised paper
- Preprint (discussion started on 24 Feb 2025)
- Supplement to the preprint
Interactive discussion
Status: closed
            Comment types: AC – author | RC – referee | CC – community | EC – editor | CEC – chief editor
                | : Report abuse 
            
        - 
                     RC1:  'Comment on egusphere-2025-596', Anonymous Referee #1, 18 Apr 2025
            
            
            
            
                        - AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Xiaofei Wang, 27 Jun 2025
 
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                     RC2:  'Comment on egusphere-2025-596', Anonymous Referee #2, 23 Apr 2025
            
            
            
            
                        
            
                        - AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Xiaofei Wang, 27 Jun 2025
 
Peer review completion
                AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision | EF: Editorial file upload
            
        
                        AR by Xiaofei Wang  on behalf of the Authors (27 Jun 2025)
                             Author's response 
                             Author's tracked changes 
                             Manuscript 
                    
                
                        ED: Publish as is (18 Jul 2025) by Yves Balkanski
                
                             
                            
                          
                    
                 
                            
                          
                    
                        AR by Xiaofei Wang  on behalf of the Authors (23 Jul 2025)
                             Manuscript 
                    
                 
 
                           
                 
                 
                 
                 
                 
                     
                     
                     
                    
Overall, the paper is well written, it is clear, and the work is interesting. I think small changes are needed to improve the paper.
You need more discussion in the introduction section about the presence of heavy metals and PAHs in dust events in general, to show if the lake produces more, and how the emissions you found compare to these findings.
The map( Figure 1) should appear earlier to explain the sampling locations, as it was unclear to me until I got to the result part and saw that figure. Also, the usage of A, B, and C is weird. Can you give it a normal name?
Consider moving some of the figs from the supplement section to the main section, as some of them are important for the understanding of the paper.
You have several figs that seem too small, like Fig 2, or I couldn't see the numbers of some of the figures in the supplements, as Fig S5, the yellow color is not showing, and the size of the figures was very hard to examine, even when I used a magnification of 200
Specific comments
Line 68, Owen Lake is not the primary dust source in the US
Line 151 misplacement of () in citation
Lines 444-454: Is there any level of exposure for these metals that you could add to how, if the values were above these thresholds
Line 473 is missing a space between s15 and to present
Table S5 seems like a mistake, or unclear, most heavy metals do not have values.