Review of Peletidou et al. (2026)

The paper by Peletidou et al. presents fluorescence lidar observations from Thessaloniki, Greece, and introduces a classification scheme that combines the spectral fluorescence capacity, and the aerosol depolarization ratio, and additional contextual information. The results indicate the importance of fluorescence measurement and show how they can elucidate a more accurate assignment of dust, smoke and pollen compared to traditional aerosol typing methods. The methodology and the presentation of the different fluorescence retrieval techniques are well written and help the reader understand the ramifications of the study. The paper fits the scope of the journal and is suitable for publication. However, before final publication, I have listed several general and technical comments below that can help improve the manuscript.

General comments

Line20: Why is there a sub-dataset?

Line31: It is worth including the work of Miri et al. (ACP, 2025) who similarly introduce an aerosol typing model incorporating fluorescence information.

Lines22-26: Do the reported ranges refer to the aerosol type assignment methodology?

Lines51-53: Give more context. What is the “Aerosol Remote Sensing requirements”?

Line54: What is “LILAS”?

Line119: What is “LIF”?

Line127: Table 1 is not introduced in the text.

Line163: Why not using the Raman backscatter?

Lines222-223: You mention that the layer is confided within the boundary layer and its top reaches 3.2 km. Given that this is a nighttime measurement, can you elaborate on this assertion?

Line225: Why does not the table report the values for the 14/5/2025 case?

Lines229-231: In this sentence, you mention that the smoke case is presented in Fig. 2b. Figure 2b shows the absolute difference among the two G_F for either case. Is this simply a typo here or do I miss something?

Line275: A reference to support this statement is needed.

Lines277-280: To me, the text implies that all layers from Figure 3 are included in HYSPLIT, whereas the HYSPLIT plot actually only reflects layers 3 and 4 from Table 5. Also, why not include layers 1 and 2?

Line296 & 300: What is the value in parentheses?

Line303: Why only 2 days?

Line322: My criticism with this section is the following. The typing of the layer is anchored on the layer mean value of the spectral fluorescence capacity by comparing with literature and excluding other aerosol types. Precisely, this is the added value of a fluorescence lidar when it comes to aerosol typing. However, Hysplit runs do not offer the adequate resolution for this kind of investigation. Do you have access to in situ measurements that might indicate the presence of pollen? It might be helpful also to check pollen forecasting model outputs if available.

Lines357-362: Why not make the colorscale discrete by using the thresholds as discussed in this paragraph? Like this, the cases will be grouped according to the thresholds you highlight in your discussion,

Lines363-372: In this paragraph, you describe the typing procedure that is shown in Figure 6b. All the criteria and thresholds invoked need to be justified and relevant references acknowledged, if any. Furthermore, a flowchart or a table would help the readers.

Lines377-379: Long range transported biomass does not only originate from North America as it is demonstrated by Amiridis et al. (2009). For sake of completeness, it is worth mentioning other source areas.

Lines388-390: If I get it right, figure 7 and table 8 come from the analyzed cases. Why not report a similar table containing the thresholds of your typing procedure?

Line402: You can populate the table with more statistical metrics to help understand better the differences among the aerosol types.

Line407: The differences among the boxes relevant to the work of Veselovskii et al (2002b) and your study are not discussed in this section. Please do so.

Line410: I might have missed the reason behind the selected temporal window (i.e. March 2024 – April 2025) for the analysis. Can you clarify this point? Also, I found in line 245: “… April 2024…” which further confused me.

Lines412-413: I would leave out the text in parentheses else you need to explain it.

Lines421-422: I see no layers over 8 km. Is it maybe a typo?

Line445: The term “fluorescence typing” is an oversimplification. I would probably rephrase it.

Technical comments

Line18: Remove “event”

Line82: Consider swapping “Damialis et al. (2017)” with “they”.

Line116: Add “the” before “National”.

Line136: It should be “subscripts”.

Line267: The beginning “In addition, in order…” is rather awkward. Consider changing it.

Line 278: Change “six” to “five”.

Line283: Remove “aerosol”.

Line320: Remove the first “of”.

Line389: Remove “with IF”.

Line408: Add “Empty” before “dashed”.