Articles | Volume 18, issue 22
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-18-6795-2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
In-flight emission measurements with an autonomous payload behind a turboprop aircraft
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- Final revised paper (published on 19 Nov 2025)
- Supplement to the final revised paper
- Preprint (discussion started on 21 May 2025)
Interactive discussion
Status: closed
Comment types: AC – author | RC – referee | CC – community | EC – editor | CEC – chief editor
| : Report abuse
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RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-2026', Anonymous Referee #1, 11 Jun 2025
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Gregor Neumann, 26 Sep 2025
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RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-2026', Anonymous Referee #2, 05 Aug 2025
- AC4: 'Reply on RC2', Gregor Neumann, 26 Sep 2025
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RC3: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-2026', Anonymous Referee #3, 20 Aug 2025
- AC2: 'Reply on RC3', Gregor Neumann, 26 Sep 2025
- AC3: 'Reply on RC3', Gregor Neumann, 26 Sep 2025
Peer review completion
AR – Author's response | RR – Referee report | ED – Editor decision | EF – Editorial file upload
AR by Gregor Neumann on behalf of the Authors (26 Sep 2025)
Author's tracked changes
Manuscript
EF by Mario Ebel (29 Sep 2025)
Author's response
ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (29 Sep 2025) by Charles Brock
AR by Gregor Neumann on behalf of the Authors (06 Oct 2025)
Author's response
Manuscript
Post-review adjustments
AA – Author's adjustment | EA – Editor approval
AA by Gregor Neumann on behalf of the Authors (17 Nov 2025)
Author's adjustment
Manuscript
EA: Adjustments approved (17 Nov 2025) by Charles Brock
Summary: The impact is well-motivated, showing the importance of studying short range flights with turboprop aircraft. Significance of the impact, difficulty of the measurement, and lack of comparable datasets highly motivate the scientific significance. The method is sound and calibrations and subsequent analyses are thorough, including variance and error propagation. Some explanation as to why the aerosol instruments need to be pressurized would be preferable, since I was confused by the explanation of sampling stability. I am suspicious of the particle sizing and concentration accuracy at the small sizes ~10nm, due to the cut size of the particle counters (exacerbated by diffusion losses) leading to large correction factors, thus the mode size may be slightly overestimated; however, results compare well to previous airborne measurements with similar instrumentation from Moore et al., 2017. The author did a very good job characterizing instrument response to sample and environmental factors, and uncertainty. There are a couple of typos.
L15-17: Are the size distributions presented from the total or nonvolatile aerosol? If total, suggest removing “soot” and generalizing as jet engine emissions, since the soot implies non-volatile particulates.
L25-26: Incomplete sentence. Suggest combining with previous sentence.
L97: L228 is the first time bringing up isokinetic, but it would be helpful to mention at the introduction of the aerosol inlet.
L122-123: Can you expand on what “ensuring stable sampling conditions” means? Why would the instruments need to be in a pressurized vessel? It introduces a higher deltaP and increases the potential for dilution/leak into the sample.
L206-208 & F5b: The curve fit deviates from the measured counting efficiency right around your critical operating environment. The operating environment is barely captured in your data points. Higher resolution in the region that you measure (more points between 375-250 hPa) would result in more precise correction.
L223: Is the 90-degree tube bend sufficiently large enough radius to be negligible for inertial impaction of large particles? Valuable to mention if negligible here when describing other loss mechanisms.
L259: Typo. soot soot.
L267: Why the range in sheath flow? Is the range from intentional changes, e.g., compensating for pressure to achieve the same size range in a scan, or fluctuation due to environment? What is the corresponding sample flow?
L270: Typo on mSEMS. “Is able to operate at 5 s scan time”, does that mean you did operate a 5 s scan? What was the lag time from the sample out of the DMA to the aMCPC? For a 5-second scan, the smearing may be significant. You don’t mention operation scan times until L509, and it’s worth mentioning how it was operated in section 2.1.8. 17s scan while in a highly variable plume seems too slow for samples shown in F7 without a large lag chamber. Were scans averaged to suppress the noise, and if so, how many scans are used for averaging?
L289-290: Is it supposed to read “sizing” instead of “size”? Why are instrument sizing and flow calibration major sources of uncertainty? Are you talking about the physical size due to unknown refractive indices?
F9, F5c, F5d: The combined effects of the aMCPC size cut, counting efficiency with pressure, and diffusion losses, hurts the confidence in the size distributions below 20 nm. I expect the entire left-side falling edge of the curve in Figure 9 in plume would have increasing error bars associated with it, which may provide context/caution in interpreting the mode size from the fit in F9b. The aMCPC may not be the best choice for engine emission characterization since its cut size is near to the exhaust particle size range. There may be a significant number of sub-10 nm particles missing from the tPM when calculating the EI. Perhaps the EI should be specified as the EI_tPM>10nm at the top of the document. This may be less of a concern for this generation of engine, but consider ultra fine CPCs when testing future generation engines that combust more efficiently that they may have a smaller mode size where the aMCPC will completely misinform/bias the peak.