Interactive comment on “Overview of the Chemistry-Aerosol Mediterranean Experiment/Aerosol Direct Radiative Forcing on the Mediterranean Climate (ChArMEx/ADRIMED) summer

Review of the submitted paper to ACP “Overview of the Chemistry-Aerosol Mediterranean Experiment/Aerosol Direct Radiative Forcing on the Mediterranean Climate (ChArMEx/ADRIMED) summer 2013 campaign” by Mallet et al. The authors present the overview of the ChArMEx/ADRIMED campaign, which investigates the properties and the radiative effects of aerosols Mediterranean region (mostly Western and Central parts of it). Unfortunately, during the campaign period no major aerosol events/plumes occurred in the region in terms of AOD. This manuscript mostly paves the way to the other papers of the way, so in its current status is light in term of scientiﬁc ﬁndings,

although there is presentation of a lot of material from different observations/models mostly as capability examples but not necessarily connected between them (as they refer to different events/periods in general) or answering specific scientific questions. Thus, at the end the reader is wondering why this paper should be published. Personally, as a reviewer I see two ways that could improve the paper in order to make it suitable for publication in ACP. Either strengthen the Introduction section by expanding significantly the discussion about the rationale of the campaign and the open scientifically questions that it tries to tackle together with a Conclusion section about the outcomes of the whole campaign (at least till now) and not just the main findings of this manuscript only. Or provide more scientific results in sections 5 and 6, which are connected together and not just sub-sections of the type 'the instrument/model observed/simulated this and more deep analysis can be found in that paper'. I encourage the authors to do the respective work in order to improve the quality of their paper and see it published.
Major comments 1.Page 19621, Line 17-18: "Numerous studies have documented the AOD for pollutedanthropogenic Mediterranean aerosols ..." Why in the introduction there is an overview of the literature only for AOD? What about other properties of aerosols like single scattering albedo (SSA), vertical distribution, etc., there is no information about them, but there are also important.
2.Page 19626, Line 1-9: Which are the open scientific questions addressed by the campaign? From the three main objectives, the first is general applicable to every campaign and the second has been addressed already in the literature, so which are the novelties except from the application to a new dataset (although may be more extensive)? The third objective seems more original; however there is no citing paper in the manuscript trying to explore the questions of this objective. Someone may say that it is rather early to tackle these questions, something that future papers will do. However, there is not indication about that in the current manuscript. In any way it is C6847 not clear why this campaign was/had to be organized, except for the obvious reason of providing a new extensivie dataset.   Fig. 19.

3.Which of the results summarized in the
23.Page 19656, Lines 15-18: Certainly the wavelength dependence is lower than below the 2 km, but it is not very small, as someone can see just above and below the peak at about 3 km. Why this happens?
24.Page 19657, Lines 6-8: Is the LNG cross section in Fig. 23 correct? It seems from the text and the AOD figure below that the latitude axis is inverted. 28.Page 19670, Lines 24-27: As it is written the phrase does not make sense to me, while I am looking at Fig. 29. Please provide more explicitly the type of surface (desert, sea, vegetation) after the word "TOA".