The influence of water vapor anomalies on clouds and their radiative effect at Ny-Ålesund

Nomokonova, Tatiana; Ebell, Kerstin; Löhnert, Ulrich; Maturilli, Marion; Ritter, Christoph

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-5157-2020

Articles | Volume 20, issue 8

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-5157-2020

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

Special issue:

Arctic mixed-phase clouds as studied during the ACLOUD/PASCAL...

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-5157-2020

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

Articles | Volume 20, issue 8

Research article

|

30 Apr 2020

Research article |

| 30 Apr 2020

The influence of water vapor anomalies on clouds and their radiative effect at Ny-Ålesund

Tatiana Nomokonova, Kerstin Ebell, Ulrich Löhnert, Marion Maturilli, and Christoph Ritter

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Final revised paper (published on 30 Apr 2020)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 04 Nov 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Referee comment', Anonymous Referee #1, 12 Nov 2019
RC2: 'First Review of Nomokonova et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 05 Jan 2020
- AC1: 'Response to both Referees', Tatiana Nomokonova, 20 Feb 2020

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Anna Wenzel on behalf of the Authors (25 Feb 2020) Author's response

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (25 Feb 2020) by Timo Vihma

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (28 Feb 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The revised manuscript ”The influence of anomalous atmospheric conditions at Ny-Ålesund on clouds and their radiative effect” addresses how moisture anomalies are related to cloud properties and cloud radiative effect at Ny-Ålesund in the Arctic. After revision, the paper is now more coherent, and easier to follow. I recommend minor revision, before this paper can be published.

Detailed comments:

- Page 2, Line 22: define the time scale of this increase. Is it a seasonal increase, or increase in long-term winter mean (=trend)?

- Page 5, Line 30: The sentence “found FLEXTRA back trajectory files with corresponding reaching time” could be rephrased. Data files do not have to be mentioned, it is enough to tell about the matching time. Specify also what is meant by “reaching time”.

- Page 6, Lines 1-2: what is meant by this: “6-day trajectories are sufficient to capture the air
transportation to the Arctic.”? Why do you need 6 days to capture air mass transport to the Arctic?

- Page 6, line 6: what is meant by this: “Mewes and Jacobi (2019) have shown that a similar horizontal air mass transport happens when air from the North Pacific flows into the Arctic.”? What is” a similar horizontal air mass transport”, especially if it comes from a completely different region?

- Figure 6: This caption must be wrong. (a) is LW and (b) is SW, right?

- Page 8, line 9: I assume 6b shows the SW and not LW. If so, this figure number here is not correct.

- Page 12, lines 17-19: Please rewrite this sentence to make it clearer. A suggestion: “Air masses originating from the North Atlantic are typically associated with increased surface temperature and IWV in the Svalbard region, whereas those originating from North Pacific are linked to a decrease in surface temperature and IWV (Dahlke and Maturilli, 2017).”

- Page 12, lines 20-26: Nice that the sea ice is now mentioned, but I would like to know whether there is a connection between the sea ice decline and IWV trend. Even if you do not quantitatively analyze this, you can estimate it in more detail based on existing literature. Is it likely that the sea ice loss is directly associated with the winter trend in moist anomalies?

- Page 12, lines 20-26: You mentioned that low sea ice coverage in spring and summer can enhance evaporation. In spring this is certainly true, but in summer the evaporation is really small in the sea areas, while most of the evaporation occurs on land.

- Page 12, lines 20-26: I would like to add that reduced sea ice coverage enhances evaporation, but also allows for more efficient transport of moist air masses (without loosing their moisture on the way). So, sea ice also affects the transported moisture. Maybe you could add something like “allows for an increased moisture transport at the location”.

- Summary and conclusions: This section has improved since the first version. However, I recommend some further changes: This section consist of 11 short paragraphs (shortest of them having only two sentences). Either group them so that you have only one (fluently written) paragraph for moist anomalies and one for the dry ones (+ a paragraph in the beginning and 1-2 in the end), or organize your conclusions with numbers/bullet points. In this current format, it is rather difficult to get an clear overview of the nice and valuable results of this study!

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RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (14 Mar 2020)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (15 Mar 2020) by Timo Vihma

AR by Tatiana Nomokonova on behalf of the Authors (21 Mar 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (29 Mar 2020) by Timo Vihma

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Short summary

This paper presents an influence of water vapor anomalies on cloud properties and their radiative effect at Ny-Ålesund. The study is based on a 2.5-year active and passive cloud observation and a radiative transfer model. The results show that moist and dry conditions are related to strong changes in cloud occurrence, phase partitioning, water path, and, consequently, modulate the surface radiative budget.