BRICK v0.2, a simple, accessible, and transparent model framework for climate and regional sea-level projections

Wong, Tony E.; Bakker, Alexander M. R.; Ruckert, Kelsey; Applegate, Patrick; Slangen, Aimée B. A.; Keller, Klaus

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-2741-2017

Articles | Volume 10, issue 7

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-2741-2017

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-2741-2017

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

Articles | Volume 10, issue 7

Model description paper

|

17 Jul 2017

Model description paper |

| 17 Jul 2017

BRICK v0.2, a simple, accessible, and transparent model framework for climate and regional sea-level projections

Tony E. Wong, Alexander M. R. Bakker, Kelsey Ruckert, Patrick Applegate, Aimée B. A. Slangen, and Klaus Keller

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Final revised paper (published on 17 Jul 2017)
Preprint (discussion started on 12 Jan 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'peer review comments and suggested revisions', Anonymous Referee #1, 03 Mar 2017
- AC1: 'Response to RC1', Tony Wong, 10 Apr 2017
RC2: 'reviewer comment - BRICKv0.1', Anonymous Referee #2, 09 Mar 2017
- AC2: 'Response to RC2', Tony Wong, 10 Apr 2017
RC3: 'Reviewer comment on Brick v0.1', Anonymous Referee #3, 15 Mar 2017
- AC3: 'Response to RC3', Tony Wong, 10 Apr 2017
EC1: 'Revised version send back to 2 reviewers', Olivier Marti, 24 Apr 2017

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Tony Wong on behalf of the Authors (10 Apr 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (24 Apr 2017) by Olivier Marti

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (28 Apr 2017)

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (10 May 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The revisions have clearly been done competently and concise.

Still, I feel that the point of originality has to be clarified further. The authors now refer to BRICK v0.2, which only differs to Bakker16b, as stated by the authors, by the addition of a simple estimate of land water storage and rejection sampling that accounts for it. This is a very small addition to justify a new description paper. Rather, the reader should be guided to the author’s intention, as I read it now, to communicate the underlying design principles better and detail the previously described model.

I would therefore suggest to write in the abstract:
… Here, we describe the simple model framework BRICK (Building blocks for Relevant Ice and Climate Knowledge) v0.2 and its underlying design principles. The manuscript adds detail to an earlier published model setup and discusses the inclusion of a land water storage component. The framework largely builds on existing models and allows for projections of global mean temperature as well as regional sea levels and coastal flood risk. BRICK is written in R and Fortran. ...

and in the Introduction (L15, p2 in the tracked-changes version):
Here we describe in detail BRICK (“Building blocks for Relevant Ice and Climate Knowledge”, Bakker16b) v0.2, a model framework that focuses on accessibility, transparency, and flexibility while maintaining, as much as possible, the computational efficiency that make simple models so appealing. As compared to Bakker16b, BRICK v0.2 accounts for land water storage with the other components kept unchanged ...

These changes (or similar ones) would clearly point the reader to the fact that this is not a completely new model.

Minor comment:
αGIS and aGIS read very similar. Maybe exchange one of the parameter names.

References:
Bakker, A. M. R., Wong, T. E., Ruckert, K. L. and Keller, K.: Sea-level projections accounting for deeply uncertain ice-sheet contributions (Submitted to Nature Scientific Reports), ArXiv e-prints [online] Available from: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.07119, 2016b.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (Editor review) (30 May 2017) by Olivier Marti

AR by Tony Wong on behalf of the Authors (02 Jun 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (14 Jun 2017) by Olivier Marti

AR by Tony Wong on behalf of the Authors (14 Jun 2017) Manuscript

Short summary

We present the Building blocks for Relevant Ice and Climate Knowledge (BRICK) model v0.2. BRICK is a model for hindcasting past and projecting future surface temperature and sea-level rise, resolving the sea-level contributions from glaciers and ice caps, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and thermal expansion. BRICK is specifically designed to support decision analyses through its transparency, and includes functionality to scale global sea-level estimates to regional projections.