Comment on acp-2021-693

This study performs 2 large, idealized simulation ensembles of sea breeze convection evolution covering a range of atmospheric and surface parameters, 1 with low aerosol loading and the other with high aerosol loading, with a statistical emulator used to fill in sensitivities across a greater range of conditions. The authors find that increased aerosol loading via reduction of incoming shortwave radiation inhibits surface fluxes and the land-sea thermal contrast that drives the daytime sea breeze. This thus contributes to weaker convection along the sea breeze front, particularly for warm clouds and through suppression of deep convection initiation. Once deep convection initiates, aerosol effects on convective updrafts are modulated by other atmospheric conditions. Under all conditions, increased aerosol loading suppresses precipitation with a magnitude that is modulated by other atmospheric conditions. It is further found that soil saturation fraction is the most important modulator of updraft velocity variance in cumulus clouds ahead of the sea breeze of the parameters tested. Overall, this is study, could in that I note in the detailed Although the importance of aerosol direct effects on atmospheric thermodynamic structure and clouds is known, it largely been ignored in recent studies focusing on microphysical impacts from aerosols. This study connects these two pieces over a wide range of low-level thermodynamic states, providing a nice addition to literature in this area. I have several “major” concerns regarding choices and interpretations of some analyses. In addition, analyses mix shallow and

Following one is my old paper that compared aerosol and thermodynamic impacts on low clouds by measuring 95%-frequency ranges of aerosol index and lower-tropospheric stability (Fig 3) in order to discuss relative importance.
Matsui, T., H. Masunaga, S.M. Kreidenweis, R.A.Pielke, Sr, W.-K. Tao, M. Chin, Y. Kaufman (2006), Satellite-based assessment of global warm cloud properties associated with aerosols, atmospheric stability, and diurnal cycle, Journal of Geophysical Research-Aerosol andClouds. 111, D17204, doi:10.1029/2005JD006097. You don't need to re-set new ranges of parameters for another hundreds of simulations, because you can just use a statistical emulator to estimate the relative impact of different parameters in standardized range. But, you have to understand statistical distributions of these parameters in the real world to understand "typical (one/two standard deviation)" ranges. With the standardized ranges of environmental parameters, you can state which parameters are important or not.

Section 5.1 and 5.2 (Figures 5-7)
: I don't quite understand why you plot cleanpolluted differences in zig-zag form, because simulation ID in X-axis does not represent physics at all. There should be a more effective way to represent this statistical representation. For example, histograms (clean, polluted, and clean-polluted) would be better to represent statistical differences, distributions, and significance of these sensitivity overall. Same issue also applies to Fig 10, too.
Section 5.2.1 (Figure 8): You mentioned that "It is clear from this figure that….", but these scatter diagrams are not clear to me for comparison reasons. You may create a probability density grid scatter diagram (instead of dots), and you may plot cleanpolluted. Or, at least, you may overlay scatter plots of clean and polluted like Fig 9e-f, and conduct some statistical process to mention "significant" or "clear" differences between clean and polluted cases. For example, if you compute clean-polluted differences in auto-conversion profiles, and you can create CFAD to summarize all cases in one plot for each microphysical process (melting of ice, ice-to-rain, rain-to-ice, cloud-to-rain, etc..), it would be nice, because Test ID does not show any information of environmental factors anyway. So far, it's too numerous and mechanical test ID. So, it's difficult to extract physics from this plot.

Minor Comments:
Resolution: Simulations are conducted with 1km grid spacing, and discussion of shallow-todeep convection transition can be limited. I understand this is purely because of computational limitations with the many ensemble simulations. At least, you should mention this limitation somewhere in the manuscript.
Line 37: I suggest ditch following sentence of this paper's topic "Such organised tropical convection also plays an essential role in global climates via its impacts on planetary circulations such as the Walker circulation or the Madden-Julian Oscillation (Hendon and Woodberry, 1993;Zhang, 2005)." This paper is not dealing with organized tropical convection.
Line 139: Table 1 is not refered from sentences.
Line 243: Add "and less surface turbulent heat flux" after "With less surface upwelling longwave radiation,".
Line 247: "longwave radiation" -> "longwave radiation and surface turbulent heat flux" Figures 3 and 4 (and related discussion) might be combined, since these are all surface impact and feedback.
For any question/discussion, contact to me (Toshihisa.