Aerosol Mineralogical Study Using Laboratory and IASI Measurements: Application to East Asian Deserts

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript have improved from the first version, with clearer explanations and better english grammar. There are still some minor typos, as the text in figure 7 (b), that says "Clear Sky above desert" and it should probably say "mineral dust above desert". Also, the captions in figures 9 and 12 still add "by day" after the date. The authors probably mean "at daytime". I recommend accept it after a minor revision.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for your comments.
Figure 7 was modified. Captions in figures 9 and 12 were modified day was replaced by ‘daytime’.

Reviewer 2 Report

I originally pointed out that "thermal infrared (TIR)" was defined several times whereas it only needs to be done once on first appearance. This continues to be the case for the revised manuscript.

Apart from that, my other issues with the original submission have been addressed satisfactorily.

 

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for your comments.

The duplicate definition is removed in this new version.

Reviewer 3 Report

This study explores  the mineral composition of dusts from satellites with IASI and lab measurements.  The idea is novel and should be of interest to many scientists in remote sensing.  Therefore, the paper is publishable with minor corrections.

1) Figure quality need to be improved.  Such as Figure 1 and others.

2) It's not clear whether in-situ samples are taken for laboratory measurements, perhaps I missed that.  In any case, it would be good to use in-situ samples for validation, or perhaps it's future work.

3) The number of references are too extensive.  Do the authors really need 79 references for a study like this?

Author Response

Dear reviewer,
Thank you for your comments.
1- The resolution was improved for Figure 1,4,5,6,7.
2- These are in-situ measurements provided by Frederic Thevenet from SAGE Laboratory at IMT Lille-Douai (Cf. Acknowledgement). This information is found in the 3^rd sentence of section 3.2.
3- References were revised and reduced as much as possible to 68 references in this new version.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors make a credible case for being able to extract mineralogical composition of airborne dust from IASI data and validate their retrievals by computing back-trajectories to source regions and comparing retrieved spectra with laboratory measurements on samples collected in situ. Technically this paper is sound in methodology, results, and conclusions but its important message is defeated by poor presentation on several fronts. The language deficiencies are such that even readers familiar with the topic matter will have difficulty following the arguments; more casual readers would have great trouble. The manuscript must therefore undergo major rewriting before it can be accepted for publication.

This reviewer began noting down individual deficiencies as the review proceeded, but it quickly became apparent that the cumulative number of these made that approach impractical. Approximately 80-90% of the lines in the manuscript are afflicted by one or more deficiencies involving spelling, grammar, misplaced punctuation, word usage, case usage, missing or excess articles, other missing or excess words, and general sentence construction. It is essential that these problems be rectified by a comprehensive editorial review using spell- and grammar-check tools. Once this has been done, the authors’ attention is directed to a number of specific items that need to be addressed:

1. Beginning with the Abstract and continuing throughout the manuscript (including some figures) the word “residue” is written when “residual” is meant, and “case of study” when “case study” is meant.
2. Minerals and other chemicals are capitalized, when they should be lower case.
3. “Thermal Infrared (TIR)” is defined several times. This only needs to be done once on first appearance.
4. L54: “Korean Golf” should read: “Korean Gulf.”
5. L61: I believe the authors mean “determine” rather than “exploit.”
6. Figures 4, 10, and 11 are indistinct in their current form. Recommend the two panels in each be expanded and positioned vertically instead of horizontally.
7. Figures 6 and 8: The color key does not seem to match the data plots.
8. LL544-545: Are “molecular bonds” really the cause of friability? I believe it has more to do with crystal structure.
9. Petitprez and Deschutter are co-authors, so it is unnecessary to note their contributions in the Acknowledgments.

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript titled “Aerosol Mineralogical Study from Laboratory to IASI Measurements: Application to East Asian Deserts”, by Alalam et al., presents a method to characterize dust mineralogy from IASI data. A new Surface Emissivity Optimization method, taking advantage of the Reststrahlen feature, is proposed. The authors claim to be able to fit different linear combinations of pure mineral extinction coefficient to the residue of the method, but, as shown in figure 13, the fit is very poor and the method need further evaluation and testing before it can be applied to real cases with reliable results. Also, the manuscript is plagued with typos and hard to understand sentences, highlighted in the attached document.

As main concerns, the fitting procedure must be firstly tested with laboratory data, as the one shown in Figure 2, and establish the goodness of fit and errors. Then, the main trends of the IASI data must be analyzed for several cases, not just one. The fitting shown in figure 13 is very poor, which may be due to artifacts in the methods.

Taking all this into account, my recommendation is to reject the manuscript, encouraging the authors to resubmit with a better assessment of the method and more experimental fitting results.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf