From the journal Environmental Science: Atmospheres Peer review history

29-May-2023

Dear Dr Dada:

Manuscript ID: EA-ART-05-2023-000065
TITLE: Synergistic role of sulfuric acid, ammonia and organics in particle formation over an agricultural land

Thank you for your submission to Environmental Science: Atmospheres, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. I sent your manuscript to reviewers and I have now received their reports which are copied below.

I have carefully evaluated your manuscript and the reviewers’ reports, and the reports indicate that revisions are necessary.

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Environmental Science: Atmospheres strongly encourages authors of research articles to include an ‘Author contributions’ section in their manuscript, for publication in the final article. This should appear immediately above the ‘Conflict of interest’ and ‘Acknowledgement’ sections. I strongly recommend you use CRediT (the Contributor Roles Taxonomy, https://credit.niso.org/) for standardised contribution descriptions. All authors should have agreed to their individual contributions ahead of submission and these should accurately reflect contributions to the work. Please refer to our general author guidelines https://www.rsc.org/journals-books-databases/author-and-reviewer-hub/authors-information/responsibilities/ for more information.

I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Yours sincerely,
Dr Lin Wang
Associate Editor, Environmental Science: Atmospheres

Environmental Science: Atmospheres is accompanied by companion journals Environmental Science: Nano, Environmental Science: Processes and Impacts, and Environmental Science: Water Research; publishing high-impact work across all aspects of environmental science and engineering. Find out more at: http://rsc.li/envsci

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Reviewer 1

Major comments:
1. Line 96. The NAIS and DPMS do not cover the same range, how was it found that NAIS overestimate concentration by a factor of 5? More specifically, how was the overestimation factor determined for particles in the size range from 3 nm to 6 nm?
2. Figure 3 uses 4 pptv of DMA, while figure 4 uses 1.8 pptv DMA? Why are different concentrations of DMA are used in these two figures?
3. What is the average temperature during NPF? Without this information, the ‘5 C’ and ’20 C’ in figure 3 do not really make sense.
4. To me it seems that Figure 4B is the only support to rule out sulfuric-amine nucleation (Figure 3 is not because the ‘4 pptv’ is mystical). Three questions: (1) can you comment on the robustness of the method from Cai et al.? Will instrument calibration accuracy affect Fig. 4B? (2) If I adjust the amine concentration to, say, 1 ppt, will the model and observation agree? 1.8 ppt was obtained from an urban site. (3) Livestock is believed to be a major source of amines. Is there relevant literature on amine concentration over agricultural lands? If yes, these works should be cited and discussed.
5. Although no closure between growth rates and OOMs concentrations was achieved, I suggest adding plots of OOMs concentration in different volatility bins so that future measurements by other groups can be compared to this work.

Minor comments:
6. In the significance statement the authors wrote “the recognition of agricultural lands as solely harmful to our planet could change”. Although I understand what the authors are trying to say, but how many people actually recognize ‘agriculture land as solely harmful to our planet’? Maybe it’s better to say ‘as global warming contributors’.
7. In the abstract, the second sentence is obscure. What are ‘oil-emitted compounds’? What are VOCs ‘originating from a side production of photosynthesis’ ? It is much better to be specific.
8. Line 11. Fraction-> ‘number fraction’. Please add citations to support this claim.
9. Line 30. Are grass land equal to agricultural lands?

Technical corrections:
Line 380: ‘While no closure…’ Could the author rewrite this sentence?
Line 14: precursors vapors -> precursor vapors
Figure 3: The subscripts and units look very awkward in this figure. Please fix them.
Figure S9: Exert?

Reviewer 2

This study provides an interesting field campaign work focusing on agricultural lands. The important potential nucleation precursors including several acids, ammonia and organics were measured. The potential roles of those precursors are analyzed in detail in addition to the influence of temperature and wind speed. Finally, the climatic importance is inferred. This work provides valuable information about aerosol formation mechanisms occurred in agricultural lands. I recommend this work to be published.
There are several comments below:
1. The statement that “The studied field is a grass land, and the soil type is clay, representing a typical northern hemisphere agricultural land” should be supported by relevant citations to prove the representative role of the studies field.
2. The discussion about the role of HIO3 and MSA in particle formation is scarce. The conclusion that their overall concentrations are too low should be supported by more explanations. Since the argument that sulfuric acid contributes to particle formation is mainly supported by the correlation between formation rate and sulfuric acid concentration, I am wondering how the correlation between formation rate and HIO3/MSA concentration is.
3. About the particle formation mechanisms, according to Figure 4, it seems like that sulfuric acid and ammonia participate in particle formation while OOM is ruled out as no clear correlation between OOM and J1.5 is observed. But according to Figure 3, the observation data points lie in the area from H2SO4, NH3 and OOM as it is stated that “ the data points from Qvidja fall on the same line of data points obtained from chamber experiments where H2SO4, NH3 and oxygenated organic molecules (OOM) were involved in the particle formation”. So the role of OOM in particle formation seems confusing, more discussions should be made.

We thank both reviewers for their constructive feedback which helps improve our manuscript. We addressed all their comments and included a point-by-point response in the attached document.

02-Jul-2023

Dear Dr Dada:

Manuscript ID: EA-ART-05-2023-000065.R1
TITLE: Synergistic role of sulfuric acid, ammonia and organics in particle formation over an agricultural land

Thank you for your submission to Environmental Science: Atmospheres, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. I sent your manuscript to reviewers and I have now received their reports which are copied below.

After careful evaluation of your manuscript and the reviewers’ reports, I will be pleased to accept your manuscript for publication after revisions.

Please revise your manuscript to fully address the reviewers’ comments. When you submit your revised manuscript please include a point by point response to the reviewers’ comments and highlight the changes you have made. Full details of the files you need to submit are listed at the end of this email.

Please submit your revised manuscript as soon as possible using this link :

*** PLEASE NOTE: This is a two-step process. After clicking on the link, you will be directed to a webpage to confirm. ***

https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/esatmos?link_removed

(This link goes straight to your account, without the need to log in to the system. For your account security you should not share this link with others.)

Alternatively, you can login to your account (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/esatmos) where you will need your case-sensitive USER ID and password.

You should submit your revised manuscript as soon as possible; please note you will receive a series of automatic reminders. If your revisions will take a significant length of time, please contact me. If I do not hear from you, I may withdraw your manuscript from consideration and you will have to resubmit. Any resubmission will receive a new submission date.

The Royal Society of Chemistry requires all submitting authors to provide their ORCID iD when they submit a revised manuscript. This is quick and easy to do as part of the revised manuscript submission process. We will publish this information with the article, and you may choose to have your ORCID record updated automatically with details of the publication.

Please also encourage your co-authors to sign up for their own ORCID account and associate it with their account on our manuscript submission system. For further information see: https://www.rsc.org/journals-books-databases/journal-authors-reviewers/processes-policies/#attribution-id

Environmental Science: Atmospheres strongly encourages authors of research articles to include an ‘Author contributions’ section in their manuscript, for publication in the final article. This should appear immediately above the ‘Conflict of interest’ and ‘Acknowledgement’ sections. I strongly recommend you use CRediT (the Contributor Roles Taxonomy, https://credit.niso.org/) for standardised contribution descriptions. All authors should have agreed to their individual contributions ahead of submission and these should accurately reflect contributions to the work. Please refer to our general author guidelines https://www.rsc.org/journals-books-databases/author-and-reviewer-hub/authors-information/responsibilities/ for more information.

I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Yours sincerely,
Dr Lin Wang
Associate Editor, Environmental Science: Atmospheres

Environmental Science: Atmospheres is accompanied by companion journals Environmental Science: Nano, Environmental Science: Processes and Impacts, and Environmental Science: Water Research; publishing high-impact work across all aspects of environmental science and engineering. Find out more at: http://rsc.li/envsci

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Reviewer 1

The authors have addressed most of my concerns. My only suggestion is to add Figure R1 to the supplementary information.

Responses to reviewer comments for manuscript entitled ‘Synergistic role of sulfuric acid, ammonia and organics in particle formation over an agricultural land’.

We thank the reviewers for their feedback. We added the requested figure to the supplementary materials as suggested.

06-Jul-2023

Dear Dr Dada:

Manuscript ID: EA-ART-05-2023-000065.R2
TITLE: Synergistic role of sulfuric acid, ammonia and organics in particle formation over an agricultural land

Thank you for submitting your revised manuscript to Environmental Science: Atmospheres. I am pleased to accept your manuscript for publication in its current form.

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With best wishes,

Dr Lin Wang
Associate Editor, Environmental Science: Atmospheres

Environmental Science: Atmospheres is accompanied by companion journals Environmental Science: Nano, Environmental Science: Processes and Impacts, and Environmental Science: Water Research; publishing high-impact work across all aspects of environmental science and engineering. Find out more at: http://rsc.li/envsci

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