NO<sub><i>y</i></sub> production, ozone loss and changes in net radiative heating due to energetic particle precipitation in 2002–2010

Sinnhuber, Miriam; Berger, Uwe; Funke, Bernd; Nieder, Holger; Reddmann, Thomas; Stiller, Gabriele; Versick, Stefan; von Clarmann, Thomas; Wissing, Jan Maik

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-18-1115-2018

Articles | Volume 18, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-18-1115-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-18-1115-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 18, issue 2

Research article

|

29 Jan 2018

Research article |

| 29 Jan 2018

NO_y production, ozone loss and changes in net radiative heating due to energetic particle precipitation in 2002–2010

Miriam Sinnhuber, Uwe Berger, Bernd Funke, Holger Nieder, Thomas Reddmann, Gabriele Stiller, Stefan Versick, Thomas von Clarmann, and Jan Maik Wissing

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Final revised paper (published on 29 Jan 2018)
Preprint (discussion started on 22 Jun 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Review of "NOy production, ozone loss and changes in net radiative heating due to energetic particle precipitation in 2002-2010"', Anonymous Referee #1, 12 Jul 2017
- AC1: 'Author reply to comment of reviewer 1, "NOy production, ozone loss and changes in net radiative heating due to energetic particle precipitation"', Miriam Sinnhuber, 22 Sep 2017
RC2: 'review of Sinnhuber et al', Anonymous Referee #2, 14 Jul 2017
- AC3: 'Authors response to comment of reviewer 2 "NOy production, ozone loss and changes in net radiative heating due to energetic particle precipitation"', Miriam Sinnhuber, 22 Sep 2017
SC1: 'Correction to the conclusions regarding previous work', Annika Seppälä, 28 Jul 2017
- AC2: 'Authors reply to interactive comment SC1', Miriam Sinnhuber, 22 Sep 2017

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Miriam Sinnhuber on behalf of the Authors (04 Oct 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (08 Oct 2017) by William Ward

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (28 Oct 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have been very responsive to my suggestions and I appreciate the difficulties in getting the ozone correct. I concur with their argument that by simply looking at year to year changes it is hard to discern particle precipitation effects; rather the difference fields in Section 4.3 are the way to go. Subject to some minor comments about wording, the paper is ready for publication.

Fundamentally, I also concur with their fundamental point that the SH winter sees continuous downwelling while the NH is dynamically controlled. However, I would quibble with their terminology slightly- stratospheric warmings can be minor or major, but “strong” isn’t really a standard descriptor (see the paper by Butler et al in the Bulletin of the AMS, 2015, page 1913). Rather the events in 2004, 2006 and 2009 were characterized by prolonged or extended (depending upon which paper you read) recoveries with elevated stratopauses that are linked to enhanced descent. The present paper is a bit muddled in how they describe it. I am reluctant to suggest that they add too many more references; however I can suggest Randall et al [GRL, 2006] for the the 2006 event. (They have Manney, but she didn’t discuss the NOx descent the way Randall does). Papers by Siskind (2007, 2010) or Chandran (2010, 2012) or Limpasuvan (2016) discuss the elevated stratopause phenomena. They may wish to add some citations to those events because they do seem to be different than the conventional major stratospheric warming. Finally, regarding summer events in the NH, Siskind (ACP, 2016) talked about how the consequences of dynamical variability of the previous winter could get frozen into the summer and lead to lower ozone- without particle precipitation. I wonder if this is relevant.

They do have a lot of words and perhaps get tripped up in the details. For example, at the bottom of page 34 (line 33) they start a sentence “in the solar maximum winters” and then, list a whole bunch of years in parentheses including 2005-2006 and 2008-2009 (top of page 35). Those years are hardly solar maximum. They should clean this up a bit.

Another example of problematic presentation was that in general, I found Figures 14 and 15 hard to read and the text – particularly the new stuff on page 37, often confused me. They should consider cutting the plots off at 10 hpa, rather than going down to the troposphere. As far as wording problems, for example, last line of page 37. “net radiative rate of 1-2.5K” ? Do they mean K/day? Also, Line 27 on page 37, “net values” – is that “net changes” or “net absolute values”. And that whole sentence is garbled- they say “in the range 1-2.5 K/day………. reaching more than 0.5 K/day……..”. Well, 0.5K/day is not a “reach” if its in the middle of their range. Or alternatively, if the 1-2.5 K/day is the absolute value, then a change of 0.5 K/day is at least 20% of the absolute value, not 2-10% as stated on line 29. So no matter how I look at the discussion, I find it confusing.

Small reference glitch: I could not find a citation in the text to Prather, 1986, which is given in their reference list.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (23 Nov 2017) by William Ward

AR by Miriam Sinnhuber on behalf of the Authors (01 Dec 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (16 Dec 2017) by William Ward

AR by Miriam Sinnhuber on behalf of the Authors (21 Dec 2017)

Short summary

Results from global models are used to analyze the impact of energetic particle precipitation on the middle atmosphere (10–80 km). Model results agree well with observations, and show strong enhancements of NO_y, long-lasting ozone loss, and a net heating in the uppermost stratosphere (~35–45 km) during polar winter which changes sign in spring. Energetic particle precipitation therefore has the potential to impact atmospheric dynamics, starting from a warmer winter-time upper stratosphere.

NOy production, ozone loss and changes in net radiative heating due to energetic particle precipitation in 2002–2010

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NO_y production, ozone loss and changes in net radiative heating due to energetic particle precipitation in 2002–2010