Common volume satellite studies of polar mesospheric clouds with Odin/OSIRIS tomography and AIM/CIPS nadir imaging

Broman, Lina; Benze, Susanne; Gumbel, Jörg; Christensen, Ole Martin; Randall, Cora E.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-12455-2019

Articles | Volume 19, issue 19

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-12455-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Layered phenomena in the mesopause region (ACP/AMT inter-journal...

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-12455-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 19, issue 19

Research article

|

08 Oct 2019

Research article |

| 08 Oct 2019

Common volume satellite studies of polar mesospheric clouds with Odin/OSIRIS tomography and AIM/CIPS nadir imaging

Lina Broman, Susanne Benze, Jörg Gumbel, Ole Martin Christensen, and Cora E. Randall

Download

Final revised paper (published on 08 Oct 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 25 Jan 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of “Common volume satellite studies of polar mesospheric clouds with Odin/OSIRIS tomography and AIM/CIPS nadir imaging” by Broman et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 25 Feb 2019
- AC1: 'Reply to reviewer 1', Lina Broman, 27 May 2019
RC2: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #1, 01 Apr 2019
- AC2: 'Reply to reviewer 2', Lina Broman, 27 May 2019

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Lina Broman on behalf of the Authors (24 Jun 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (28 Jun 2019) by Andreas Engel

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (12 Jul 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Review of “Common volume satellite studies of polar mesospheric clouds with Odin/OSIRIS tomography and AIM/CIPS nadir imaging” by Broman et al.

The Reviewer thanks the authors for carefully answering the Reviewer’s concerns. There is one remaining important point and that is in the discussion of the Bailey et al. [2015] study on pp. 25-26 comparing CV SOFIE and CIPS IWC. The specific comments on that paragraph are as follows:

1. On p. 25 line 33 the authors use the term “edge of visibility” in regards to the CIPS PMC observations in the CV with SOFIE. This is a little misleading because the authors have just described how OSIRIS cannot see small particles, which seems to be a different problem than what the authors are getting at here. The reviewer suggests “at the terminator” instead of “at the edge of visibility” if that is what they mean, to avoid any confusion.

2. On p. 25 line 36 the improvement is better but it seems hard to say “much” better when CIPS IWC goes from 50% less to 30% less compared to SOFIE. The authors do not lose anything here if they delete “much”.

3. The authors should clarify that the adjustments that Bailey et al. [2015] made to the CIPS background are not in the operational CIPS v4.2 product. Without any adjustments at all the Bailey et al. abstract states that the CIPS IWC is 50% less than SOFIE in the CV. The Reviewer therefore suggests that the sentence beginning on p. 25 line 39 should read something like: “Bailey et al. (2015) show that the reported v4.2 CIPS IWC is 50% smaller than the SOFIE IWC in the common volume, but only ~30% smaller when correcting the CIPS background removal (their Figure 11).” The authors should be aware that later versions of the CIPS product (i.e. v5) are supposed to correct this bias, though to the Reviewer’s knowledge this has not yet been verified.

4. On line 39-40 the Reviewer suggests the authors be more quantitative in this summary as they have just quoted the 30% difference in the sentence before. From Figure 7 it appears that the average CIPS IWC is 33% more than that of OSIRIS in the CV. If that is the correct number, then the Reviewer suggests rewriting the sentence beginning at the end of line 39 as follows: “In the present study, we find that the CIPS IWC is 33% greater than the OSIRIS IWC in the common volume (Figure 7).” If they would like to add uncertainties to this number to be consistent with the abstract then they should.

Hide

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (12 Jul 2019) by Andreas Engel

AR by Lina Broman on behalf of the Authors (20 Jul 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (22 Jul 2019) by Andreas Engel

Short summary

Combining satellite observations of polar mesospheric clouds are complicated due to satellite geometry and measurement technique. In this study, tomographic limb observations are compared to observations from a nadir-viewing satellite using a common volume approach. We present a technique that overcomes differences in scattering conditions and observation geometry. The satellites show excellent agreement, which lays the basis for future insights into horizontal and vertical cloud processes.