LPJmL4 – a dynamic global vegetation model with managed land – Part 2: Model evaluation

Schaphoff, Sibyll; Forkel, Matthias; Müller, Christoph; Knauer, Jürgen; von Bloh, Werner; Gerten, Dieter; Jägermeyr, Jonas; Lucht, Wolfgang; Rammig, Anja; Thonicke, Kirsten; Waha, Katharina

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-1377-2018

Articles | Volume 11, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-1377-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

The Lund–Potsdam–Jena managed Land (LPJmL) dynamic...

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-1377-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 11, issue 4

Model evaluation paper

|

12 Apr 2018

Model evaluation paper |

| 12 Apr 2018

LPJmL4 – a dynamic global vegetation model with managed land – Part 2: Model evaluation

Sibyll Schaphoff, Matthias Forkel, Christoph Müller, Jürgen Knauer, Werner von Bloh, Dieter Gerten, Jonas Jägermeyr, Wolfgang Lucht, Anja Rammig, Kirsten Thonicke, and Katharina Waha

Download

Final revised paper (published on 12 Apr 2018)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 27 Jul 2017)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

SC1: 'Code Accessibility', Lutz Gross, 05 Aug 2017
- AC1: 'Response to Code Accessibility', Sibyll Schaphoff, 17 Aug 2017
RC1: 'Comment on MS', Anonymous Referee #1, 14 Sep 2017
RC2: 'Comment on gmd-2017-146', Anonymous Referee #2, 21 Sep 2017

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Sibyll Schaphoff on behalf of the Authors (22 Dec 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (15 Jan 2018) by Julia Hargreaves

In the conclusion it is stated that the model results are adequate. My question is, adequate for what? We all know that no model is perfect, and indeed that no observations are perfect, and that in some cases there may be representation error making models and observations difficult to compare. The question is really what does the level of performance of the model say about what the problems the model may be successfully used to tackle (and of course the opposite - in what ways is it not useful). I think that a few comments on this topic may improve the usefulness of this paper!

Please make the code available, then describe how it may be obtained. Please also provide the DOI for the exact version of the code described in the paper.

Other materials may be uploaded to a public repository with a DOI, or added to the supplement. Weblinks are very ephemeral. Try to include as few weblinks as possible in the final version of the paper.

This paper and its companion paper are fairly epic. They could really do with clickable tables of contents, but unfortunately that is not supported within the journal formal. I am very grateful to the 4 reviewers for their carefully considered reviews.

For such long papers in GMD it is important that as many of the details are correct as possible. Readers may well dip into the papers, and make use of small details. If there are errors then this considerably reduces the utility of the paper. At the same time, it is unlikely that any of the peer review team are in a position to find these kind of errors. So, you can either check the paper very carefully yourselves at this stage, or you could also ask people who know the model well but are not authors on the paper to check the content for errors. It is up to you, but the latter method has been employed with considerable success (i.e. some important errors were found!) for other long papers in GMD.

Hide

AR by Sibyll Schaphoff on behalf of the Authors (25 Jan 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (26 Feb 2018) by Julia Hargreaves

AR by Sibyll Schaphoff on behalf of the Authors (26 Feb 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (05 Mar 2018) by Julia Hargreaves

AR by Sibyll Schaphoff on behalf of the Authors (05 Mar 2018) Manuscript

Short summary

Here we provide a comprehensive evaluation of the now launched version 4.0 of the LPJmL biosphere, water, and agricultural model. The article is the second part to a comprehensive description of the LPJmL4 model. We have evaluated the model against various datasets of satellite observations, agricultural statistics, and in situ measurements by applying a range of metrics. We are able to show that the LPJmL4 model simulates many parameters and relations reasonably.