Improved aerosol correction for OMI tropospheric NO<sub>2</sub> retrieval over East Asia: constraint from CALIOP aerosol vertical profile

Liu, Mengyao; Lin, Jintai; Boersma, K. Folkert; Pinardi, Gaia; Wang, Yang; Chimot, Julien; Wagner, Thomas; Xie, Pinhua; Eskes, Henk; Van Roozendael, Michel; Hendrick, François; Wang, Pucai; Wang, Ting; Yan, Yingying; Chen, Lulu; Ni, Ruijing

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-1-2019

Articles | Volume 12, issue 1

Atmos. Meas. Tech., 12, 1–21, 2019

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-1-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Atmos. Meas. Tech., 12, 1–21, 2019

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-1-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 12, issue 1

Research article 02 Jan 2019

Research article | 02 Jan 2019

Improved aerosol correction for OMI tropospheric NO₂ retrieval over East Asia: constraint from CALIOP aerosol vertical profile

Mengyao Liu et al.

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Final revised paper (published on 02 Jan 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 07 Mar 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Review of Mengyao et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 02 May 2018
- AC1: 'response to Referee #1', Mengyao Liu, 01 Jul 2018
RC2: 'Referee comment', Anonymous Referee #2, 05 Jun 2018
- AC2: 'response to Referee #2', Mengyao Liu, 01 Jul 2018

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Anna Wenzel on behalf of the Authors (02 Jul 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (07 Jul 2018) by Diego Loyola

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (25 Jul 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

This is my second review of this manuscript. The authors have addressed some of the concerns I had in my previous review. Re-organization of some sections has been helpful for clarity. Inclusion of the QA4ECV data is commendable. However, the authors have not addressed many of my earlier comments. Therefore, I would not recommend accepting the manuscript in the current form.

Major concerns:

1) Data/results discussed in this manuscript are based on biased slant column data and inconsistent inputs as I have discussed in detail in my previous review. Instead of revisiting the work, the authors chose to modify the version number and suggested that they will not release the data. This may be a conflict to AMT’s data policy. Moreover, I could not locate how each of the comments is addressed in the revised manuscript.

2) Their explanation for the limited number of MAX-DOAS data is well taken. But, they could still use various statistical methods and maybe other data sources to assess the improvements. Small increase in correlation alone, which may not be statistically significant, cannot be a measure of retrieval improvements (main message of this manuscript). One can raise many questions for results presented in Tables 2 and 3: What explains more than 20% difference between POMINO v1.1 and POMINO?, how is the 30% high bias of v1.1 versus MAX-DOAS an improvement?, what explains a factor of 2 difference in slope between DOMINO and QA4ECV if it is not related to slant column?, why is the comparison so poor for the improved QA4ECV OMI product?, are MAX-DOAS data accurate/reliable?, etc. From Figure 9, the relationship between DOMINO and MAX-DOAS looks much tighter as compared to POMINO and MAX-DOAS (except for few data points) and POMINO does not show an improvement if MAX-DOAS is the ground truth.

3) The "Author’s Response" does not seem to include a marked-up manuscript version. Therefore, it is not clear if the authors have sufficiently addressed the reviewers’ comments and how they are addressed.

Minor comment:
4) It is difficult to relate the reported contents (numbers) in abstract/conclusions/discussions to tables as the tables provide results for a subset of samples but not for the entire samples. Including statistics of Figure 9 in table would be helpful.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (29 Aug 2018)

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (07 Sep 2018) by Diego Loyola

AR by Anna Mirena Feist-Polner on behalf of the Authors (16 Nov 2018) Author's response

ED: Publish as is (01 Dec 2018) by Diego Loyola

AR by Mengyao Liu on behalf of the Authors (06 Dec 2018) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

China has become the world’s largest emitter of NO_x, which mainly comes from vehicle exhaust, power plants, etc. However, there are no official ground-based measurements before 2013, so satellites have been widely used to monitor and analyze NO_x pollution here. Aerosol is the key factor influencing the accuracy of the satellite NO_x product. Our study provides a more accurate way to account for aerosol's influence compared to current widely used products.

Improved aerosol correction for OMI tropospheric NO2 retrieval over East Asia: constraint from CALIOP aerosol vertical profile

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Interactive discussion

Peer-review completion

Improved aerosol correction for OMI tropospheric NO₂ retrieval over East Asia: constraint from CALIOP aerosol vertical profile