Biomass-burning-derived particles from a wide variety of fuels – Part 1: Properties of primary particles

McClure, Crystal D.; Lim, Christopher Y.; Hagan, David H.; Kroll, Jesse H.; Cappa, Christopher D.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-1531-2020

Articles | Volume 20, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-1531-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-1531-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 20, issue 3

Research article

|

07 Feb 2020

Research article |

| 07 Feb 2020

Biomass-burning-derived particles from a wide variety of fuels – Part 1: Properties of primary particles

Crystal D. McClure, Christopher Y. Lim, David H. Hagan, Jesse H. Kroll, and Christopher D. Cappa

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Final revised paper (published on 07 Feb 2020)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 15 Aug 2019)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review comment to the “Biomass-burning derived particles from a wide variety of fuels: Part 1: Properties of primary particles” by McClure et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 10 Sep 2019
- AC1: 'Response to Reviewer #1', Christopher Cappa, 10 Sep 2019
RC2: 'Review of McClure et al. (2019)', Anonymous Referee #2, 24 Sep 2019
- AC2: 'Response to Reviewer #2', Christopher Cappa, 01 Nov 2019

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Christopher Cappa on behalf of the Authors (01 Nov 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (04 Nov 2019) by Manabu Shiraiwa

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (05 Nov 2019)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (30 Nov 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

In their rebuttal, McClure et al. didn’t address points 6 and 7 of my first round comments (did I miss something here?). I consider both points to me major and important and hence, I ask them to address them again in this second round of revisions:
1) Title should bear the word “laboratory” since the observed results might not be applicable to real world fires. For e.g., something like: “Laboratory-based biomass burning particles from a wide variety of fuels: Part 1: Properties of primary particles”

2) The authors provide no explanation (beyond a hand waving argument) to back the statement “The contribution of coating-induced enhancements (i.e. lensing effects) to absorption by black carbon are shown to be negligible for all conditions”. Lensing or focusing of light to the core could also be possible with weakly light-absorbing coating materials such as brown carbon with low imaginary index of refraction. Such a coating would facilitate lensing in addition to itself absorbing. The only convincing way to declare that “no lensing” takes place is by looking at the internal field strength of a brown-carbon coated BC aggregate (see methodology in Chakrabarty and Heinson, Phys. Rev. Lett, 2018). I would like to see such a rigorous analysis performed (DDA or T-Matrix and not Mie-based core-shell) by the authors on a few BC aggregates coated with BrC vs non-refractory materials and convincing the reviewer and the community if indeed the “no lensing” claim is valid. If the authors cannot perform such an analysis, then I suggest that they remove all statements from the abstract and the main text regarding “negligible coating-induced enhancements (lensing effects)”. Instead, rephrase or replace the sentences with “brown carbon-coated BC particles yield absorption enhancements of x and y values…”

Referee Report: PDF

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ED: Reconsider after major revisions (30 Nov 2019) by Manabu Shiraiwa

AR by Christopher Cappa on behalf of the Authors (09 Dec 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (03 Jan 2020) by Manabu Shiraiwa

Post-review adjustments

AA: Author's adjustment | EA: Editor approval

AA by Christopher Cappa on behalf of the Authors (04 Feb 2020) Author's adjustment Manuscript

EA: Adjustments approved (04 Feb 2020) by Manabu Shiraiwa

Short summary

We characterized various optical, chemical, and physical properties of particles produced from combustion of a variety of different biomass fuels, many representative of those found in the western US. We find that many properties scale with the ratio between bulk average organic aerosol and black carbon mass concentrations, although there are some properties that do not.