The manuscript acp-2020-842 by Kostenidou et al. presents a relatively comprehensive analysis of emissions from Euro 5 diesel and GDI vehicles. The work is well done, thoroughly discussed, and presents useful data. However, the manuscript is possibly more suited to a journal focused on emissions and air quality, as it represents incremental progress. However, ACP has published similar work before. This decision is
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Interactive commentPrinter-friendly version Discussion paper ultimately the Editor's. However, considering the thorough analysis and useful data, I would recommend publication in ACP after the following revisions.
Major comments1.The manuscript is not a technical note in my opinion. The analysis and literature discussion are thorough. There are no new technical advances. The label does not seem appropriate.The authors fully agree with the reviewer, this is a research article, and indeed we sent it to ACP as a research paper. The categorization as "technical note" has been suggested by an Executive Editor of ACP, we could not do much about it.2. The abstract, manuscript, and figures do not emphasize enough that the diesel engines used DPFs while the gasoline engines did not. Of course, particulate emissions were lower after the DPFs. comment Printer-friendly version Discussion paper ionization in the AMS, and that the AMS results agreed well both with photoelectric aerosol sensor (PAS) measurements and also GC-MS offline filter samples for several PAHs and few methyl-PAHs. The results of the intercomparison gave an uncertainty of +35% and −38%. More recently Hartikainen et al. (2020) applied Herring et al. (2015 method to PAHs in fresh and aged residential wood combustion emissions. It is true that for alkyl-and nitro-PAHs more fragmentation is expected.The authors consider that Herring et al. ( 2015) is a quite reliable method for PAHs identification and estimation with the advantage of being an online technique, issue remains for nitro-PAHs and some alkyl-PAHs. The authors will be careful and will rather use the term estimate and identification instead of quantification. A recent work from Yang et al. (2018) measured PAHs and functionalized PAHs both in the gas phase and particle phase emitted from GDI cars. The authors used Teflon filters for particle bound PAHs and used GC/MS. For NO2-PAHs they used CI negative mode GC-MS. Their results are discussed in the EFs PAHs and are, in general, in good agreement to what found in our work. Surprisingly low NO2-PAHs were found by Yang et al. (2018) for GDI vehicles (1% of the total PAHs).