Hygroscopic properties and cloud condensation nuclei activity of atmospheric aerosols under the influences of Asian continental outflow and new particle formation at a coastal site in eastern Asia

Cheung, Hing Cho; Chou, Charles Chung-Kuang; Lee, Celine Siu Lan; Kuo, Wei-Chen; Chang, Shuenn-Chin

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-5911-2020

Articles | Volume 20, issue 10

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-5911-2020

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-5911-2020

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

Articles | Volume 20, issue 10

Research article

|

19 May 2020

Research article |

| 19 May 2020

Hygroscopic properties and cloud condensation nuclei activity of atmospheric aerosols under the influences of Asian continental outflow and new particle formation at a coastal site in eastern Asia

Hing Cho Cheung, Charles Chung-Kuang Chou, Celine Siu Lan Lee, Wei-Chen Kuo, and Shuenn-Chin Chang

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Final revised paper (published on 19 May 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 25 Jul 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Referee report', Anonymous Referee #1, 16 Sep 2019
- AC1: 'Respond to the Referee#1's comment', Charles Chou, 22 Jan 2020
RC2: 'Interactive comment on "Hygroscopic properties and CCN activity of atmospheric aerosols under the influences of Asian continental outflow and new particle formation at a coastal site in East Asia"', Anonymous Referee #4, 29 Oct 2019
- AC2: 'Response to anonymous referee #4', Charles Chou, 22 Jan 2020

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Charles Chou on behalf of the Authors (22 Jan 2020) Author's response

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (13 Feb 2020) by Aijun Ding

RR by Anonymous Referee #4 (17 Feb 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Most of my comments have been well answered. And more details and deep discussions have been added in the revised manuscript. However, there are still some points which are not well considered:

Many thanks for the responses to the reviewer comments and for the revised version of the manuscript. The manuscript improved and most of the reviewer comments are addressed. At this stage, I recommend this paper to be published in ACP regardless few issue remains.

I hope the author can consider the following comments and suggestions before it published.
1. To make sure we are discussing about the same thing, Please comfires that,Rose et al., (2010) should refers to:
Rose, D., Nowak, A., Achtert, P., Wiedensohler, A., Hu, M., Shao, M., Zhang, Y., Andreae, M. O., and Pöschl, U.: Cloud condensation nuclei in polluted air and biomass burning smoke near the mega-city Guangzhou, China – Part 1: Size-resolved measurements and implications for the modeling of aerosol particle hygroscopicity and CCN activity, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 10, 3365–3383, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-10-3365-2010, 2010.

There are more missing reference(s) in the revised manuscript, e.g. Rose et al., (2008), please check carefully.

2. One concern still remains that: to what extend can we trust the kappa calculated from ‘the cut-off diameter’ by Rose et al., (2010)? I have admitted that I missed this paper before. Rose et al., (2010) suggests this should be an alternative approach when lacking size-resolved CCN data for polydisperse aerosols.

In my previous comments, I suggested authors to make comparison between kappa calculated from ‘cut-off diameter’ and kappa calculated from D50 (diameter where 50% particle been activated). I understand it is a little beyond the scope of this paper and too time and cost assuming if the authors don’t have size-resolved CCN-counter system.

I also hope the authors to notice that, many previous studies beside Rose et al., (2010) calculated the cut-off diameter, but most of them did not process one step further to calculate the kappa from cut-off diameter, I believe there must be some underlying reason for this.

About all, I highly recommend that the authors use few sentences to address that ‘This approach is an alternative approach and should be used with caution when aerosols are not poly dispersed‘.

Reference(s):

Rose, D., Nowak, A., Achtert, P., Wiedensohler, A., Hu, M., Shao, M., Zhang, Y., Andreae, M. O., and Pöschl, U.: Cloud condensation nuclei in polluted air and biomass burning smoke near the mega-city Guangzhou, China – Part 1: Size-resolved measurements and implications for the modeling of aerosol particle hygroscopicity and CCN activity, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 10, 3365–3383, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-10-3365-2010, 2010.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (16 Mar 2020)

ED: Publish as is (20 Mar 2020) by Aijun Ding

AR by Charles Chou on behalf of the Authors (31 Mar 2020) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

Air pollution can result in changes to the amount and properties of aerosols, which in turn could influence climate by acting as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). This study investigated the composition and hygroscopicity of aerosols (PM_2.5) at a station under influences of eastern Asian (EA) outflows and local air mass during respective seasons. The results show that the EA aerosols were more hygroscopic, whereas new particle formation and coagulation could also influence local CCN activity.