The paper of He et al. has too much similarity with the paper of Jing et al. (2026) (https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-19-389-2026)., which is not properly disclaimed. Thus, it cannot be accepted. Thus, my decision is to reject the current manuscript, but encourage the authors to work on the structure and then re-submit. Further details are given below.

Many results are given which seem to come from the current study, but in fact they come from the paper of Jing et al. (2026), however, this it is not always clearly stated.

One example: In the abstract you state:

"During China’s rapid air-cleaning period of 2010-2017, AODamb declined significantly by -0.068 yr-1; in contrast, the rate of decrease of AODdry was -0.049 yr-1 which is 28% slower, but the decrease of the dry aerosols more accurately captures aerosol emission reductions."

But the -0.068 per year do come from the study of Jing et al. (2026) (where you are of course co-authoring) and only the -0.049 per year are the result the novel study which I review here.

This is just one example, but is valid for most of the manuscript. You need to make clear, what is new in this studyà this is investigation of the dry AOD over a longer time and the differences and so on. Everything which was resulting from Jing et al, should be clearly stated and not repeated until really needed.

You could, for example, state in the abstract:” Jing et al. (2026), found a decrease of the ambient AOD by -0.068 per year. We used the same lidar data set to estimate the dry AOD and contrast it to the ambient AOD. Doing so, we find a decrease of -0.049 per year”. Or similar.

One more example:

Figure 3a of He et al. is completely similar to Fig. 5a of Jing et al. (2026), but also here this is not properly stated and also not needed for this work.

As a consequence, I would propose the authors rework on the manuscript, which has indeed interesting and new results, but clearly make it a follow-up paper from Jing et al. (2026), stating that they use the same data set and build on the results of the previous publication.

Due to these severe issues, I also did not yet review the results part, because a clear restructuring of the manuscript needs to be done first.

However, some few comments already:

The authors need to discuss the uncertainty introduced by applying one fixed lidar ratio of 50 sr for all aerosols and all humidity conditions.

Figure 2 is not clear to me. For example, in my understanding beta_nd is needed also in the grey box, but this is not shown in this figure. Thus, please properly overwork the flowchart. Also, state when you sue radiosonde data and when ERA5.

Reference:

Jing, D., He, Y., Yin, Z., Müller, D., Huang, K., and Yi, F.: Hygroscopic growth characteristics of anthropogenic aerosols over central China revealed by lidar observations, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 19, 389–403, https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-19-389-2026, 2026.