Identifying precursors and aqueous organic aerosol formation pathways during the SOAS campaign

Sareen, Neha; Carlton, Annmarie G.; Surratt, Jason D.; Gold, Avram; Lee, Ben; Lopez-Hilfiker, Felipe D.; Mohr, Claudia; Thornton, Joel A.; Zhang, Zhenfa; Lim, Yong B.; Turpin, Barbara J.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-14409-2016

Articles | Volume 16, issue 22

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-14409-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-14409-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 16, issue 22

Research article

|

21 Nov 2016

Research article |

| 21 Nov 2016

Identifying precursors and aqueous organic aerosol formation pathways during the SOAS campaign

Neha Sareen, Annmarie G. Carlton, Jason D. Surratt, Avram Gold, Ben Lee, Felipe D. Lopez-Hilfiker, Claudia Mohr, Joel A. Thornton, Zhenfa Zhang, Yong B. Lim, and Barbara J. Turpin

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Final revised paper (published on 21 Nov 2016)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 05 Apr 2016)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'review of Sareen et al', Anonymous Referee #1, 08 May 2016
RC2: 'Review of Sareen et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 23 May 2016
AC1: 'Author Response to Reviews', Neha Sareen, 01 Aug 2016

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Neha Sareen on behalf of the Authors (28 Aug 2016) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (06 Sep 2016) by Maria Cristina Facchini

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (30 Sep 2016)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have largely addressed my main comments, with additional discussion of uncertainties and limitations. Additional comments (related to the revised text) are below; once these are addressed, this paper should be published in ACP.

Line 246: It’s unclear what these “field water” blanks are – is it just clean water treated as sample? In that case, how can the authors be sure there are no organic compounds introduced from the sampling line, filter, etc? These could be potentially major sources of organic contaminants.

Line 274: The diol-formation mechanism put forth by Zhang 2014 for MBO is highly speculative and has not been established as an important mechanism in alkene oxidation. It was put forth as a way to explain the formation of certain SOA tracer species, but no mechanistic evidence has ever been presented. (In the scheme given, the 1,5-shift shown is quite endothermic so is unlikely to be important.) The uncertainties related to diol formation mechanisms should at least be mentioned.

Line 347: The authors now note a full 70% of the ion signal did not decrease with oxidation. I agree that some changes may be masked by the simultaneous formation and loss of ions a given molecular formula ion, the odds of these exactly cancelling for ALL ions is extremely small. So these almost certainly includes unreactive species, which needs to be commented upon in more detail – perhaps an upper limit for the OH rate constant (given the estimated OH levels) for comparison. The fact that there appears to be a substantial fraction of dissolved organic species which do not rapidly oxidized is a very significant (and surprising) result in the context of atmospheric aqueous chemistry, and so simply should not be ignored.

SI: Here it is noted that CIMS sensitivity is highly sensitive to structure - however so is ESI! That is probably worth mentioning here; this makes the comparison between the two techniques potentially even more challenging.

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ED: Reconsider after minor revisions (Editor review) (13 Oct 2016) by Maria Cristina Facchini

AR by Neha Sareen on behalf of the Authors (24 Oct 2016) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (24 Oct 2016) by Maria Cristina Facchini

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