The implementation of NEMS GFS Aerosol Component (NGAC) Version 2.0 for global multispecies forecasting at NOAA/NCEP – Part 2: Evaluation of aerosol optical thickness

Bhattacharjee, Partha Sarathi; Wang, Jun; Lu, Cheng-Hsuan; Tallapragada, Vijay

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-2333-2018

Articles | Volume 11, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-2333-2018

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-2333-2018

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

Articles | Volume 11, issue 6

Model evaluation paper

|

19 Jun 2018

Model evaluation paper |

| 19 Jun 2018

The implementation of NEMS GFS Aerosol Component (NGAC) Version 2.0 for global multispecies forecasting at NOAA/NCEP – Part 2: Evaluation of aerosol optical thickness

Partha Sarathi Bhattacharjee, Jun Wang, Cheng-Hsuan Lu, and Vijay Tallapragada

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Final revised paper (published on 19 Jun 2018)
Preprint (discussion started on 20 Dec 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of The implementation of NEMS GFS Aerosol Component (NGAC) Version 2.0 for global multispecies forecasting at NOAA/NCEP: Part II Evaluation of Aerosol Optical Thickness, P. S. Bhattacharjee et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 19 Jan 2018
- AC1: 'Response to Reviewer 1 comments', P.S. Bhattacharjee, 17 Mar 2018
RC2: 'Review of ``The implementation of NEMS GFS Aerosol Component (NGAC) Version 2.0 for global multispecies forecasting at NOAA/NCEP: Part II Evaluation of Aerosol Optical Thickness''', Anonymous Referee #2, 07 Feb 2018
- AC2: 'Response to Reviewer 2 comments', P.S. Bhattacharjee, 17 Mar 2018

Peer-review completion

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

AR by P.S. Bhattacharjee on behalf of the Authors (17 Mar 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (21 Mar 2018) by Rolf Sander

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (06 Apr 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have appropriately addressed most of the discussion comments, and this revised version is a significant improvement, in particular with the new Figures 5 and 8 (per-season Taylor diagrams and station time-series plots) now allowing the seasonal effects described in the text to be seen more clearly.

However, I do have a few outstanding comments that should be addressed before final publication in ACP:

Regarding reviewer 1's comment on Section 5 and the description of R=0.28 as moderate, the revision doesn't really address the main points of either statistical significance (is this a dataset where R=0.28 could occur by chance alone?) or fraction of variance explained. Similarly, at page 11, line 33, r=0.375 is now described as "correlates well". These both seem like low r values compared to many of those in Tables 1 and 2, so the criteria for what should be considered a good correlation need to be clearer.

Reviewer 1's comment about including the 2015 Indonesian fire event in the case studies, given that it's referred to in the conclusions, doesn't seem to have been acted upon. The manuscript would certainly be improved by including this, along with the explanation given in the author's response that the underestimation results from the emission dataset.

At page 8, lines 8–9, it would be good to mention the good agreement with the ICAP-MME as supporting the theory that the significant underestimation for this case is a generic feature of coarse-resolution models, as suggested in the response to reviewer 2's comment. "Some" here should still be replaced with "many" or similar. Against AERONET (rather than ICAP-MME) it is the majority of data points in Figure 10 that are too low.

And a couple of minor technical corrections:

Page 5, lines 1–2: although the acronym "MACC" has been updated to "CAMS" as per reviewer 2's comment, the full version has not. It should be "European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts / Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service".

Page 5, line 18: the addition contains a typo (AEORNET should be AERONET).

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (17 Apr 2018) by Rolf Sander

AR by P.S. Bhattacharjee on behalf of the Authors (27 Apr 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (02 May 2018) by Rolf Sander

Short summary

National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) at NOAA recently upgraded their operational global aerosol forecast model from dust-only in version 1 to five species (dust, sea salt, black and organic carbon) of aerosols in version 2. In this work, we have validated the newly implemented aerosol model (NGACv2) which forecast at every 3 h up to 5 days against ground and satellite observations and other available model simulations.