Comment on “Short-cut transport path for Asian dust directly to the Arctic: a case Study” by Huang et al. (2015) in Environ. Res. Lett.

• Published in: Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics
• Main Authors: K. Ranjbar, N. T. O'Neill, Y. Aboel-Fetouh
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2022
• Subjects: Physics; QC1-999; Chemistry; QD1-999; Arctic
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-1757-2022; https://doaj.org/article/e3853fb6cc854b528eea91d344a2e83e

The suggestion of Huang et al. (2015) on the climatological-scale transport of Asian dust to the Arctic appears to be an important and worthwhile assertion. It is unfortunate that the authors undermined, to a certain degree, the quality of that assertion by a misinterpretation of the critical 24 March 2010 Arctic event (which was chosen by the authors to illustrate their generalized, climatological-scale Arctic transport claim). They attempted to characterize that key event using AERONET/AEROCAN retrievals taken a day later and misinterpreted those largely cloud-dominated retrievals as being representative of Asian dust while apparently not recognizing that the coarse-mode aerosol optical depth retrievals on the previous day were actually coherent with their Arctic transport hypothesis.