This work by Karle et al. (Systematic analysis of virga and its impact on surface particulate matter observations) presented some very interesting results regarding the viga precipitation, which is rarely studied. I only have some minor comments before the work can be accepted.

General comments:

1. I did not quite understand the large picture between virga precipitation and aerosol. In the abstract and in the case studies, it is stated that “We observed that during some of the columnar virga events, surface PM levels displayed a sudden upward trend indicating aerosol loading in the surface layer after precipitation evaporation.” Should it be the opposite? That is, during the precipitation virga process, PM level should be downward. That is, most of these PM are used as rain drop nuclei. Maybe I missed your point. Please explain.

1. In your Table 1, the wind speed and PM, wind speed and DeltaT have very week correlation. Do you think this is an observation issue (that is, your observation does not have finer temporal resolution)? Please explain.

Minor comments:

Fig. 7 and Fig.5, The legend for the “backscatter intensity”, I think the unit is “Z”? Can you please change it to dBZ (like in Fig. 2)

For the sounding profile (e.g., Fig. 6b), please add a legend for different color curves.