Evaluation of JULES-crop performance against site observations of irrigated maize from Mead, Nebraska

Williams, Karina; Gornall, Jemma; Harper, Anna; Wiltshire, Andy; Hemming, Debbie; Quaife, Tristan; Arkebauer, Tim; Scoby, David

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-1291-2017

Articles | Volume 10, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-1291-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Special issue:

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-1291-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 10, issue 3

Model evaluation paper

|

27 Mar 2017

Model evaluation paper |

| 27 Mar 2017

Evaluation of JULES-crop performance against site observations of irrigated maize from Mead, Nebraska

Karina Williams, Jemma Gornall, Anna Harper, Andy Wiltshire, Debbie Hemming, Tristan Quaife, Tim Arkebauer, and David Scoby

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Final revised paper (published on 27 Mar 2017)
Preprint (discussion started on 06 Oct 2016)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'reviewer comment', Anonymous Referee #1, 25 Oct 2016
RC2: 'Review of "Evaluation of JULES-crop performance against site observations of irrigated maize from Mead', Anonymous Referee #2, 07 Nov 2016
RC3: 'Reviewer comments on manuscript GMD-2016-252', Anonymous Referee #3, 15 Nov 2016
AC1: 'response to reviewers', Karina Williams, 16 Dec 2016

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Karina Williams on behalf of the Authors (16 Dec 2016) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (20 Dec 2016) by Christoph Müller

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (01 Jan 2017)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (17 Jan 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

It would benefit the reader if the authors did a better job framing the manuscript with the introduction. The introduction highlights previous work with JULES-crop that could be improved with better crop parameters (P2, L 12-13 and L18-19). But the paper also focused on the non-crop version of JULES and how driving the model with prescribed LAI and height could help tease out feedbacks on GPP. In fact, that goal doesn’t become clear until the results section. The other goal that becomes clear late in the manuscript is that this study is really presenting a methodology to tune parameters at other sites and understand possible structural uncertainty within JULES, not necessarily to improve parameters for use in JULES-crop. The authors claim they have clarified the aim of the manuscript, but I see no evidence of this until the end of the conclusions. The introduction needs to clearly set up the problem that is being addressed by this manuscript.

In Section 3.2 (Model setup), I suggest the authors indicate that the 1st run includes the crop parameters earlier than at the end of the section; otherwise it appears that maize is being run as a natural PFT.

If testing the model performance at the rain fed site is outside the scope of the study, why is the site used for parameter estimation? It should be eliminated from the manuscript to focus on the irrigated sites only.

Sometimes the variables in an equation are not defined in the text and it is up to the user to search for them in the tables (for example, the To, Tb and Tm in equation 1, α and β in equation 3, μ and ν in equation 4). Please go through all the equations and make sure they are well described for the reader in the text.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (Editor review) (28 Jan 2017) by Christoph Müller

AR by Karina Williams on behalf of the Authors (11 Feb 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (21 Feb 2017) by Christoph Müller

AR by Karina Williams on behalf of the Authors (21 Feb 2017) Manuscript

Short summary

This study looks in detail at how well the crop model within the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES), a community land-surface model, is able to simulate irrigated maize in Nebraska. We use the results to point to future priorities for model development and describe how our methodology can be adapted to set up model runs for other sites and crop varieties.