Interactive comment on “Scattering and absorption properties of near-surface aerosol over Gangetic–Himalayan region: the role of boundary

worthy. Bellow there are general and particular comments to help the authors in improving their manuscript. According to these comments, I consider that the manuscript requires substantial revision before to be accepted for publication in ACP. General comment The experimental data set is really interesting, but the study will benefit from a more exhaustive analysis of some aspects like the PBL study or the use of additional data described in table 1 but excluded from the present study, like the hygroscopic growth information. Furthermore , as reviewer #1 states the authors must clearly distinguish the outreach of the present manuscript from the previous one Dumka and Kaskaoutis (2014) where some analyses of the same data set were presented. It is worthy to note that along the text there is some confusion on the interpretation of the separation of data measured with PM10 and PM1 cut-off. It seems that the authors consider data measured with these two cut-offs as completely separated categories, while in fact the larger cut-off allows measuring the effects of micron and submicron particles at the same time. An effective characterization of micron and submicron particles could be only got by subtraction of the PM10 and PM1 associated variables.