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I appreciate your patience through this process.
# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Valeria Souza, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #
The revised manuscript addresses the major concerns of the reviewers. I suggest the following revisions be incorporated prior to acceptance.
Regards,
Michael
Line 42. Change to “..and terrestrial environments release 49 – 1900..”
Line 44. Change to “Microorganisms also aerosolize from aquatic surfaces in freshwater and saltwater aquatic environments but …” and provide a justification (little is known about…).
Lin 180. Insert comma before “which” and provide reference about the importance of wall effects.
Lines 267, 268, 269, 279, 284, 741. Remove extra commas.
Line 282. Explain “(having a higher )”
Line 352. Complete this sentence: “Rate of droplet production scales as .”
Line 362. Change to “…production agrees with a previous estimate…” and delete phrase “which estimated 5.6 m/s as the critical wind speed for breaking waves.”
Lines 397, 398, 726, 727. Insert value or symbol in “()”.
Lines 556, 607. Only caps for proper nouns in article titles.
Line 579. Italics for journal names.
Line 582. “Atmospheric Sciences”
Line 688. Provide page numbers.
The call for major revisions reflects comments provided by a reviewer who didn't review the first version of the manuscript.
Michael
The paper is improved from the first version, I now think that only minor revisions are required.
The authors have addressed my concerns about experimental design in that they cite measurements that show that the flow is not accelerating in the domain over which they are sampling. However they make an obviously erroneous statement when they do so. To say that there are breaking waves and spray and that the flow is laminar is contradictory. There can be no laminar (ie non-turbulent) flow in such conditions. I believe that they meant to say spatially uniform (or non-accelerating) flow. If the authors fix this error then the paper is publishable.
NA
Review comments have been removed by the Editorial Office. Reviewer 3 did not provide permission for their comments to be made public
Review comments have been removed by the Editorial Office. Reviewer 3 did not provide permission for their comments to be made public
Review comments have been removed by the Editorial Office. Reviewer 3 did not provide permission for their comments to be made public
Review comments have been removed by the Editorial Office. Reviewer 3 did not provide permission for their comments to be made public
I received two reviews that both called for major revisions. The third reviewer never submitted their input. Both reviewers called for more details and a stronger justification of the flume design. If you choose to resubmit, I also have some edits for your consideration.
L 44-45. Combine to read “..terrestrial and 40 to 1900 Gg of these bacteria are aerosolized each year (Burrows..)
L 49. Change to “Water surfaces produce droplets that contain microbes..”
L 58. Here and throughout avoid content-less phrases like “it has been shown that” and “have been reported to (L80)”
L 76. Change to “Strong winds increase wave-breaking..”
L 81. Here and throughout, use the article “the” judiciously. Many sentences in the text start with “The..” for no apparent reason. For example, “The bubble production..(L86)” and the many the in lines 185 – 202.
L 85. Not sure why this statement is qualified by “usually considered”
L 89. Revise to “Due to a combination…size, fragmentation droplets fall back into the water quickly and have a limited potential for..”
L 101. Delete “it”
L 105. Delete “The ammount..estimate.”
L 114. 10 micron bacteria are not typical, particularly in surface waters of the open ocean. Big bacteria, like Beggiatoa, are found in nutrient rich environs. Small microbes dominate surface waters.
L 116. Provide reference for “Microbes..droplets.”
L 122. Delete “being”
L 132. Separate phrase “such as” with commas
L 177. Replace with “surface-sterilized”
L 257. Move “This is in agreement…” to Discussion.
L 258. Delete “Table 2 ..literature.”
L 262. Delete “Probability…data.”
L 269. Replace with “having a higher R2”
L 291-294. Delete “The…Fig. 3(b).” and start paragraph with “Mass flux ranged..”
L 302. Delete “are known to”
L 331. Replace with “..droplets with diameters exceeding..dominate mass production flux”
L 354. Delete “Thus, higher wind speeds.”
L 532. Why all caps (SURF – TO -…)?
L 540 Provide page numbers
L 544. Cap first letter in journal titles (Applied and Environ..). See also lines 556, 579, 622, 625, 656..
L 559. Provide volume
L 611. Vol:page not Vol,page. See also line 619.
L 654. Provide vol:pages.
L 658, 667. Provide pages
The language used throughout is professional and meets the standards required to publish in the scientific literature. Unfortunately, a number of key topics are missing from the literature review and in those topics that are covered a number of key references are missing. The authors need to address this issue before this article can be published. Specific areas that need to be included are described in the attached PDF.
The experiment the authors describe is certainly novel and fully fits the aims and scope of the journal. Unfortunately, the description of the wind-wave flume used by the authors is not adequate making verification of the presented results impossible. Key experimental design details (replication etc.) are also missing. The authors need to address these issues before this article can be published. Specific areas that need to be included/expanded upon are described in the attached PDF.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify the robustness of the data given that key descriptions of the setup used and experimental design details are missing. It will only be possible to evaluate this when revisions to these sections have been made.
I would like to encourage the authors to spend some time revising their manuscript - their wind-wave flume is a useful addition to the tool-kit we have to investigate aerosolisation of bacteria from aquatic interfaces. Please see the attached PDF for more general comments.
Pass, the paper is well written and documented no issues here
Fail
I do not think that this design will produce an air-flow pattern that is comparable to natural situations. Furthermore the air velocity at the inlet will be higher than that farther downwind where it was measured since it is coming in through a small inlet and will spread and slow down as it moves into the large space. This has several implications.
First the wind speed at the water surface is likely larger than reported.
Second the assumption of a logrithmic boundary layer profile is likely not appropriate.
Third, the wind will decelerate away from the inlet and then increase again toward the outlet in a way that is not comparable to a wind over a natural water surface.
In order to address these issues additional measurements need to be made to deduce the velocity structure in the tank. Also some visualizations of smoke could shed some light on this. I dont believe that the streamlines revealed by this will support the analysis done and the extension to U10 but it has to be explored for the manuscript to be publishable.
Fail
This is primarily do to my serious issues with the experimental design.
Line 80 Why two different speeds given, there has been a number of papers that support the lower number.
Monahan and O’Muircheartaigh,
1986; Hanson and Phillips, 1999
Line 156, how were the particles sized if a heliocentric camera or collimnated light source were note used
Line 161, what was the air-water temperature difference
Line 272, this seems strange, any explanation?
Line 352, Should also cite Ortiz-Suslow et al, 2016 (Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, 73, 3975-3995) which has the most comprehensive droplet production measurements reported.
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