Interactive comment on “Vertical distribution of aerosols over the Maritime Continent during El Nino” by Jason Blake Cohen et al

RC: “Authors didn’t mention about the aerosol-retrieval uncertainties over the land, especially during large-scale fire events” AC: This has been mentioned in other papers we have cited and already performed over this region (Cohen, 2014; Cohen et al., 2017). However, for clarity the values will be added into this paper. There are two issues, the first with cloud cover, in which a bias may exist because extremely high AOD conditions (AOD>2) are frequently flagged as clouds. The second is the error itself over land, which can go as high as 15%. However, as you can see from the figures and the tables, the difference between the “fire region” and the “non-fire region” is significant at values where the errors are much larger than 15%. This has already been factored in, but will be made clear. The terms of the issues of the bias by cloud screening reducing the measured AOD is if anything a stronger supporting issue for the results given here, since it would make the difference between the “fire region” and the “non-fire region” even larger. It is also the reason why MISR was used for the initial definition of the two regions, since its ability to cloud clear is better than MODIS over this region. It is furthermore a point of interest when analyzing the CALIOP data, which has some ability to distinguish between aerosol and cloud. There is discussion of this in Section 2.2 and it can be expanded.