Response to the comments of Referee #2

Abstract

The paper focuses on the impact of energetic particle precipitation (EPP, both proton C1 ANGEOD Interactive comment Printer-friendly version Discussion paper and electron events) on the polar middle atmosphere. The overall goal is to determine the EPP flux thresholds at various altitudes and locations by using odd hydrogen species observed by MLS/Aura satellite and simulated by WACCM-D. Due to the significant uncertainties in satellite measurements of energetic particles, especially for electron precipitation, this study is useful. Although the study does not present critical advances, the paper is well written, the methodology is sound, and the results are in line with previous studies. Overall, I suggest publication subjected to address the following comments. Response to the general comments: We thank the reviewer for the constructive comments. We also appreciate the time devoted to the evaluation of our paper. Please try to make a more focused paper. Thirteen figures are too many for this study and make the reading difficult. It would be beneficial to try combining some of them. For example, three figures for showing the comparison of the climatology between MLS and WACCM are excessive. Other figures (at least Fig. 2 and Fig. 11) could be removed or included as supplementary information. We have removed Figures 5 and 11 to make paper more focused. Figure 2 we kept, because it is needed to demonstrate our methods. Figures 6-7 were also kept, as we would like to show comparisons of both day and night HO x. The text has been revised to accommodate the changes in the figures.

Atmospheric odd nitrogen response to electron forcing from a 6D magnetospheric hybrid-kinetic simulation

“…WACCM-D simulation data analysed in this paper are available at Finnish Meteorological Institute Research Data repository METIS (Häkkilä and Szelag, 2024). The WACCM modification enabling MLT-dependent ionization input is indexed via Zenodo (Häkkilä, 2024), and publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/hakkila/waccm_iprmlt.…”

“…In order to better implement the eVlasiator derived ionization rates, we input the forcing on a magnetic local time dependent grid. For this purpose, we created a modification for WACCM, which enables MLAT × MLT ionization forcing and turns off the Kp index driven parameterized aurora, in order to fully replace WACCM's default aurora with eVlasiator (Häkkilä, 2024).…”