War Impact on Air Quality in Ukraine

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article titled “War impact on air quality in Ukraine” is very interesting, very well written, and informative. However, the author (s) must incorporate the following issues to improve the article.

1.     The findings may benefit physical and public health studies because of the increasing duration of toxic air pollution emissions, however, contribution/novelty of study may be explicitly elaborated in introduction section.

2.     Please provide a table of recent literature relevant to topic in chronological order.

3.     The results are meaningful but robustness or sensitivity analysis should be carried out to authenticate the results.

4.     Discussion of main results with contextualization i.e. consistency or contradiction with prior studies/events is missing. The author (s) needs to provide contextualization to the main findings.

5.     The policy implications should be drawn from obtained results and should be precisely linked with your study findings.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

First of all, we want to thank You for helping us to improve the manuscript by adding such valuable “pieces of the puzzle” as statistical analysis, among others. We are grateful for this experience and will never omit doing the statistics, as it does help a lot with the confidence for the data set. We tried our best to answer all of Your suggestions. We also profusely reviewed English style and grammar and corrected a number of mistakes. Please see the manuscript with all the changes and also, please see our responses attached below for each point in the most detail possible. Although, some answers might be not 100% complete, but showing the most representative changes, as there were so many. The document light up like a carnival.  So, we apologize for that in advance.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Hello Your article is a valuable work, but the most important drawback of this article is the lack of attention to statistical work and statistical analysis. You should use statistical tests for your comparisons with previous conditions and even in different stations. Another important point is to address the issue, which is largely related to the introduction and explanation of the war, and the connection between the environment and environmental problems is not well explained. By correcting the above items, the work will definitely be presented. Good luck

Author Response

We want to thank You for helping us to improve the manuscript by adding such valuable “pieces of the puzzle” as statistical analysis. We are grateful for this experience and will never omit doing the statistics, as it does help a lot with the confidence for the data set. We tried our best to answer to all of Your suggestions, as we found them quite helpful. In addition, we made numerous English grammar and style corrections throughout the manuscript. Please see our responses for each point at the attached file:

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The research presented in the paper is very interesting since it focuses on an aspect of war that is too often neglected: it's impact on the environment. 

Not many researches are present on this topic and it's nice that the authors thought of it, even in this very sad time.

The research is presented very well and with a proper language. The source of data were clearly explained as well as the limitation for some of them. The results were adequately presented in the figures and clearly explained.

Therefore I think it would be accepted in the present form.

Author Response

Thank you for your review. We have done a thorough review of English spelling check and corrected a few grammar and style errors, on top of a few changes requested by other 2 reviewers. We appreciate your help of being part of a team in making this manuscript better. We appreciate it.

Reviewer 4 Report

The subject is interesting and original because of the war. The comparisons made without war and during war time are important. Interesting to see that some pollutants presented a decreasing in the concentrations and other presented higher concentraions during the war. 

The figure don't present good resolution.

Author Response

Thank you for your review. We have done a thorough review of English spelling check and corrected a few grammar and style errors. We appreciate your help in making this manuscript better.

Reviewer 5 Report

The article present a impact of war in Ukraine on air quailyty on basis of satelite and air quality monitoring system data from Kiev. In article the coleration of concentration of pollutants in air (NO2, PM 2.5, CO and O3) with the area of military activiti were investigated. Artice is hight quality the only sugestion for autors is that - in tables 1 and 2 add the additional collumn with description of presented data for example 2019 - "buisness as usual conditions" etc. 

Author Response

Thank you very much for your help, reviewing our manuscript. We appreciate your suggestions and think that it is a great idea to indicate which periods are business-as-usual (BAU). It helps highlight the differences between the pollution changes during the war activity compared to normal conditions. Thank you! We added the star markers (* for BAU and ** for COVID-19 affected BAU) and added applicable descriptions in the Tables 1-2 captions, as follows:

Table 1. Statistics for criteria pollutants (NO₂, CO, O₃, SO₂ and PM_2.5) during February 22 – March 8, 2019-2022. This period shows two first weeks of the Russia-Ukraine war of 2022 compared with the same dates of three previous years. The first value of each cell shows an average for the whole country, the next value shows one standard deviation or the spatial variability of the data, while the third value shows the maximum value for the country. Business-as-usual conditions (BAU) periods are marked with *, while BAU affected by COVID-19 pandemic are marked with **.

	NO2 µmol m-2	CO mmol m-2	O3 mmol m-2	SO2 mmol m-2	PM2.5 µg m-3
2019*	28.4±12.9/ 158.9	36.9±1.4/ 46.3	173.7±6.3/ 184.8	0.88±0.71/ 13.69	5.9±1.7/ 21.7
2020*	27.2±10.3/ 157.6	36.3±1.2/ 45.5	164.6±2.3/ 171.0	0.67±0.36/ 12.7	6.1±1.4/ 19.2
2021**	23.4±13.2/ 178.1	37.1±1.3/ 42.2	159.5±5.4/ 171.0	0.99±0.87/ 24.1	7.7±1.8/ 12.4
2022	21.1±9.9/ 139.7	35.2±1.3/ 36.7	173.3±1.5/ 178.6	1.07±0.98/ 19.3	3.7±0.8/ 9.7

 

Table 2. Statistics for criteria pollutants (NO₂, CO, O₃, SO₂ and PM_2.5) during the Russia-Ukraine war of 2022. Data are presented by two-week periods: the first row shows pre-war air quality (8-21 February, 2022), and the three consecutive rows show the 1-2^nd (22 February- 8 March, 2022), 3-4^th (9-22 March, 2022) and 5-6^th (23 March - 6 April, 2022) weeks of war. The first value in each cell represents an average for the whole country, the next value shows one standard deviation or the variability of the data, while the third value shows the maximum value for the country. Business-as-usual conditions (BAU) periods are marked with *.

	NO2 (µmol m-2)	CO (mmol m-2)	O3 (mmol m-2)	SO2 (mmol m-2)	PM2.5 (µmol m-2)
8-21 February*	29.4±13.7/ 237.3	35.3±1.2/ 36.8	159.1±1.3/ 161.0	1.6±2.1/ 30.9	4.2±0.8/ 12.2
22 February- 8 March	21.1±9.9 /139.7	35.2±1.3/ 36.7	173.3±1.541.9/ 178.6	1.1±0.9/ 19.3	3.7±0.8/ 9.7
9-22 March	24.2±10.8/ 176.7	37.1±0.9/ 39.1	171.7±4.6/ 181.6	0.84±0.4/ 11.6	5.2±1.0/ 11.6
23 March - 6 April	22.3±7.7/ 93.6	36.8±1.1/ 39.6	160.0±2.0/ 167.3	0.4±0.3/ 11.1	9.4±1.9/ 24.2

 

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have extensively improve the manuscript and now the article is publishable.