Geoengineering: Impact of Marine Cloud Brightening Control on the Extreme Temperature Change over East Asia

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors did a great job in improving the manuscript following the suggestions of the referee. I think the paper is of publication quality and I recommend acceptance. 

Author Response

Any additional revisions are not requested, but we upgraded most of the figures in order to enhance the publication quality of our manuscript. And also, we found and revised the list order error in the reference. We sincerely appreciate for your acceptance recommendation.

Reviewer 2 Report

if the "The net radiation flux is the sum of the upward shortwave flux and the outgoing longwave flux"  then its total flux, not the net flux.  They are both in the same direction. Upward SW and outgoing LW are directed to the space. Thats why I had this confusion earlier.  Net in general is used when you deduct two similar parameters. For example, subtraction of SW downwelling and upwelling at surface is the net SW at the surface. Many works using CERES data can be read. 

Author Response

You commented that the term "net flux" is necessary to be changed to "total flux". It seems that the sentence of "the net radiation at TOA as their sum (upward shortwave radiation and OLR)” at line 178 of manuscript makes you misunderstand, and we realized it was our critical mistake from your comment.

In our work, we actually calculated the “net” radiation with three variables of downward SW flux, upward (or reflected) SW flux, and upward LW flux (OLR) at TOA, which you mentioned. As you know well, because downward SW flux at TOA is identical in all experiments considered in our study, we just didn’t need to mention its change. In any way, we had to correct the confusing expression, and so, we corrected the sentence of line 178 to "the net radiation at TOA (net shortwave radiation minus OLR)” so as not to be confused.

Thanks to your keen advice, I could find an important mistake and correctly revise our manuscript. I appreciate your comments so much.

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

See the attached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

 

 Geoengineering: Impact of marine cloud brightening  control on the extreme temperature change over East Asia

 

Line 125: please use a different name to “??????” on the left hand side of the equation and throughout the paper. Its already present in the right hand side of the equation and  its calculated using ??????.

 

Figure 1: Please clarify how net radiative flux is calculated. Why does it decrease? Is it SW only? down-up or up -down? Do they include Longwave energy here? I would like to see the changes in the longwave forcing at surface and TOA (both upward and downward) only? Currently, it’s difficult to understand why net radiative flux decreases when they increase droplet number of marine lower (do they mean shallow? Stratocumulus tup?) clouds.

 

Line 253, An increased low cloud cover may plan an important role in radiation. So, night time LW radiation is also important. I would suggest deleting this statement.

Line 353: then why in the summer when snow cover is absent/minimum. Do we see the cooling??

 

Figure 7: can the author calculate sensitivity of the shallow cloud perturbation to cooling than efficacy?

This paper started with a great promise and an interesting analysis, but appears to be lost towards the end. I would strongly recommend to calculate the SW and LW radiative effect in their experiment. Lower clouds influence the radiation budget in a way that they cool down the planet. I would recommend looking at the changes in the SW and LW upwelling and downwelling and tease out the role of low clouds in the summertime and lowcloud/snow cover in the winter time. These additional works are needed and worth for this study. 

The authors have found out an interesting finding, but haven’t investigated the reasons behind such findings rather than using some speculations based on the cnow cover and efficacy. The question is why this cooling is happening? How low clouds perturbation in their work aid in such cooling?

Moreover, in their experiment, how snow cover changes since they attribute to the snow cover multiple time? These results need to be known. How snow cover/low cloud assist in such cooling.

 

Not sure about the region of interest in this work, but many papers have investigated the role of shallow clouds on future global warming. I suggest them reading those papers and find out the novelty of the work.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf