Temperature and water vapour measurements in the framework of the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC)

De Rosa, Benedetto; Di Girolamo, Paolo; Summa, Donato

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-405-2020

Articles | Volume 13, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-405-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-405-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 2

Research article

|

04 Feb 2020

Research article |

| 04 Feb 2020

Temperature and water vapour measurements in the framework of the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC)

Benedetto De Rosa, Paolo Di Girolamo, and Donato Summa

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Final revised paper (published on 04 Feb 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 14 May 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Review on the manuscript entitled “Temperature and water vapour measurements in the framework of NDACC” by Benedetto De Rosa, Paolo Di Girolamo, and Donato Summa.', Anonymous Referee #1, 25 Jul 2019
- AC1: 'Responses to referees', Paolo Di Girolamo, 02 Oct 2019
RC2: 'Review of "Temperature and water vapour measurements in the framework of NDACC" by De Rosa et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 08 Aug 2019
- AC2: 'Responses to referees', Paolo Di Girolamo, 02 Oct 2019

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Paolo Di Girolamo on behalf of the Authors (16 Oct 2019) Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (18 Oct 2019) by Ulla Wandinger

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (31 Oct 2019)

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (05 Nov 2019)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (08 Nov 2019) by Ulla Wandinger

Dear authors,
The reviewers of your manuscript are very pleased with the revisions you made to the manuscript. They acknowledged the exceptional quality of the replies. There are a few minor issues left (see below) and I would like to ask you to take care of them accordingly. Afterwards, the paper will be ready for publication.
Congratulation and best regards,
Ulla

Minor comments by referee #1:
I have noticed 3 'Reileigh' instead of 'Rayleigh' in the text that should be taken care of at the editing stage.

Minor comments by referee #2:
The new version of the paper has been significantly improved. The authors responded to all the comments raised by the reviewers. They added several elements, including a fourth case study.

While the way in which uncertainties are calculated is now much clearer, there are still some elements that need to be clarified. It is now clearly established that they are average accuracies calculated over an altitude range. What is still not very clear are the altitude ranges considered for the averages. Are they always the same whatever the comparison as it is suggested in the abstract?

Calibrations against radiosondes are performed between 2.5 and 4 km, which is a restricted altitude interval when considering the range of the lidar profiles, up to 50 km. This is all the truer for temperature as calibration only explores a small part of its variability For instance, the restitution of the temperature at the tropopause, very different from that between 2.5 and 4 km, is therefore done by a strong extrapolation. Thus, one would expect the uncertainties to be higher in low temperature conditions. This is an issue that should be discussed.

It is also the way of calculating errors that may go towards their minimization. In formulas 15 and 17, there are averages on RMS that should normally be considered squared. Note that the sums are bounded by (z1,z2) for some and (1,N) for others, it would be necessary to homogenize (from 1 to N it is better).

For equations 17 and 18, it would be necessary to specify more clearly what are the weights wi.

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AR by Paolo Di Girolamo on behalf of the Authors (12 Nov 2019)

ED: Publish as is (01 Dec 2019) by Ulla Wandinger

AR by Paolo Di Girolamo on behalf of the Authors (08 Dec 2019) Manuscript

Short summary

Temperature and water vapour profiles measured by the BASIL lidar are compared with profiles from several sensors/models, namely radiosondes, the IASI and AIRS satellite sensors and model reanalyses data (ECMWF & ECMWF-ERA). The comparison effort allows for the performance of all of the sensors and models to be assessed in terms of bias and RMS deviation. BASIL measurement quality is confirmed to be high enough for long-term monitoring of atmospheric composition and thermal structure changes.