Comparing the Effects of Wildfire and Hazard Reduction Burning Area on Air Quality in Sydney

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper takes a deeper understanding of the trade-off between wildfire and HRB smoke and comes to the conclusion that increasing regional HRB area would reduce regional wildfire area, but would lead to higher overall (wildfire + HRB) PM2.5 pollution in Sydney. I appreciate the authors taking time to rigorously describe and justify the models, including model selection and comparison to alternative models (i.e., GLM vs. GAM), and all the sensitivity analyses. 

Some questions from me:

1) Table A1 shows that a lot of the terms in the GLM model are not significant, shouldn't the authors considering removing these terms from the model, or use criteria such as AIC/BIC to guide the model selection and find the model with a combination of terms that yields the least AIC/BIC?

2) It would be helpful to write out the model equation in the main text (e.g., Section 2.2).

Author Response

Reviewer: This paper takes a deeper understanding of the trade-off between wildfire and HRB smoke and comes to the conclusion that increasing regional HRB area would reduce regional wildfire area, but would lead to higher overall (wildfire + HRB) PM2.5 pollution in Sydney. I appreciate the authors taking time to rigorously describe and justify the models, including model selection and comparison to alternative models (i.e., GLM vs. GAM), and all the sensitivity analyses. 

Author: Thank you for your comments. We appreciate your review

Reviewer: Some questions from me:

1) Table A1 shows that a lot of the terms in the GLM model are not significant, shouldn't the authors considering removing these terms from the model, or use criteria such as AIC/BIC to guide the model selection and find the model with a combination of terms that yields the least AIC/BIC?

Author: Our air was not to find an ideal model here. We decided not to run a model selection here as variable selection was informed by previous work, and a main aim was to see any difference in the HRB/wildfire area effect. There proved to be no significant difference as you say. But we think that having all these terms in the model, which was then used to predict for the trade-off part of the analysis was not a issue as predictions for the trade-off part would have been similar in either case. We have not changed the manuscript in response. We hope our explanation is sufficient, but we can discuss further.

Reviewer: 2) It would be helpful to write out the model equation in the main text (e.g., Section 2.2).

We have included a simple model equation in the main text as suggested

Reviewer 2 Report

1.     What is the main question addressed by the research?

The main question of the paper ” Comparing the effects of wildfire and hazard reduction burning area on air quality in Sydney” is to compare the effects of regional HRB and wildfire area on 24 hour PM2.5 in Sydney, Australia between 2012 and 2021, analyzing the active fires that occurred within 150 km of the Chullora air quality monitoring station. Simultaneously the authors used the visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership, satellite hotspots to identify days with active fires and ERA5 weather data. The hourly PM2.5 data comes from New South Wales government records for five stations in Sydney.

2. Do you consider the topic original or relevant in the field? Does it
address a specific gap in the field?

The originality of this article consists in comparing the effects of regional HRB and wildfire area on 24 hour  PM2.5 in Sydney using R statistical software.

3. What does it add to the subject area compared with other published
material?

Previously, few papers have compared wildfire and hazard reduction burns smoke and its effects on air quality and calculated and compared health costs associated with days described as either wildfire- or HRB-dominated. This paper generated wildfire data for a comparison of wildfire and HRB smoke effects using also a developed Bayesian model to predict HRB-related PM2.5 across the Sydney basin as a function of daily weather and fire attributes.

4. What specific improvements should the authors consider regarding the
methodology? What further controls should be considered?

It would be interesting to analyze other areas and to compare with the results from this study, but this does not mean that the comparison should be made in this article, may be done in other articles.

5. Are the conclusions consistent with the evidence and arguments presented
and do they address the main question posed?

The conclusions are clear and express the basic ideas resulting from the current study.

6. Are the references appropriate?

The 34 references are eloquent and appropriate for the article

7. Please include any additional comments on the tables and figures.

The 6 figures included in the current study are clear and easy to understand

This article is clearly prepared, the information is well presented and can be applied in the analysis of different areas, in order to estimate the population's total exposure to landscape fire-generated particulates.

Please correct:

line 112 Error! Reference source not found.

line 388 Error! Reference source not found.

Author Response

Reviewer: Please correct:

line 112 Error! Reference source not found.

line 388 Error! Reference source not found.

Author: Thank you for pointing these out. We will fixing these during the publication process.

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper is sufficiently novel, and the topic is widely discussed. It is an extremely comprehensive and very well-written paper and uses appropriate methodology. Therefore, this issue merits publication in Atmosphere. This paper is suitable for publication without revision.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you to the reviewer for taking the time to review our manuscript.