Methodology and Case Study for Validation of Aircraft-Induced Clouds from Hyperspectral Imagery

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

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Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Overall this is a well-written paper that apparently provides a needed algorithm for identifying aircraft induced clouds (AIC) from other aircraft or satellites for database libraries to support abatement programs.  In has some weaknesses in showing how the procedure developed could be automated and whether or not it would benefit from machine learning techniques.  But I believe it could be accepted with some fairly minor revisions.

-  The paper needs to address how the process described could be automated for different remote sensing systems such as AVIRIS or MODIS processing.  The methods outlined in section 2 read like a set of graduate student research notes.  Will this method require a human in the loop?  Can machine learning be exploited?

 Other smaller issues:

- line 15: “immediately” should be “significantly.”

- line 66: “noisy bands”, are they “noisy” or “bad?”  Or are they both?  Maybe just use one term throughout.  See lines 174-174, line 187, line 198, and Figures 3 and 4.

- lines 148-150:  Need to be careful here.  Extinction is the sum of scattering and absorption, not an independent effect.  In addition to extinction, attenuation includes other causes of energy loss along a viewing path such as optical turbulence.  Also, one must consider the atmosphere’s wavelength-dependent emission when accounting for all radiation effects along a viewing path.

- line 210: 380nm and 2510nm, not microns.

- line 212: AVIRIS radiance units include a wavelength bin width.  So it should be W str^-1 m^-2 µm^-1

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Comment to “Methodology and Case Study for Validation of Aircraft-Induced Clouds from Hyperspectral Imagery”

Significant modifications are needed, particularly efforts that describe the new methods, new findings, and so on. Actually, I think a long time for giving a “reject” or “major revision” decision from my personal opinion. A major revision is finally given here and I hope I can learn more and understand the uniqueness of this study when I get the revised version.

Abstract: too much information is provided regarding the importance of AIC, but there are too less information about the findings/advances of this study. Personally, I think the abstract should be significantly modified.

It is not suitable to cite a reference in the abstract part.

Line 28-29, water vapor cannot serve as cloud condensation nuclei, which should be particles.

Line 32, reference or evidence should be provided regarding the indication of 33% here.

Line 33-34, I do not think so since there are radiative effects from other kinds of clouds. If this is true, please provide the reference or evidence for me to learn.

Line 34, what do the authors mean “increase in Earth’s temperature structure”?

Line 35, “out to space” should be “back to space”

Line 36-38, the warming effect should be mainly from the longwave radiative effect instead of shortwave radiative effect as indicated by Zhao and Garrett (2015, doi: 10.1002/2014GL062015).

Line 38-40, for comparison of lifetime, we should use “AIC” instead of “atmospheric effect of AIC”

Line 50, “increase confidence” for what?

Line 55-56, similarly, reference is appreciated.

Line 109, how could limitations serve as the basis for methodology?

Line 171-172, how do the authors determine if a band is noisy?

Table and Figures: The quality is too low to meet the requirement of a scientific paper.

Section 2, while descriptions about the steps of the method is provided, I cannot capture the creativity or uniqueness or advantages of the method. Could the authors explain more to me?

Figure 5 and 6, sorry that I do not understand the main point the authors would like to deliver here.

Line 276, how could the authors make observation at so high resolution of wavelength with accuracy to 0.0000001 um (values of 0.4724773 um)?

Figure 7, more explanations about this figure and results are highly needed. For honesty, I do not understand the results here.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

The authors precent a nice and well written paper on the methodology of detecting aircraft induced clouds from hyper spectral imagery. The background and introduction is adequate and covers the scientific field in a clear manner.

Some improvements are suggested:
Som of the graphics show image compression artefacts, JPGs? reset the images in a lossless format.

The validation of the method needs to be none with a larger imageset to give statistical significanse. Whith the few number of omages used, it more a proof-of-concept than validation.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

No more comments.

Author Response

We made some further revisions to improve English language and further address some comments from the reviewers.

We thank this reviewer for the nice advice and helpful comments!