Global sensitivity analysis of parameter uncertainty in landscape evolution models

Skinner, Christopher J.; Coulthard, Tom J.; Schwanghart, Wolfgang; Van De Wiel, Marco J.; Hancock, Greg

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-4873-2018

Articles | Volume 11, issue 12

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-4873-2018

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-4873-2018

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

Articles | Volume 11, issue 12

Model evaluation paper

|

06 Dec 2018

Model evaluation paper |

| 06 Dec 2018

Global sensitivity analysis of parameter uncertainty in landscape evolution models

Christopher J. Skinner, Tom J. Coulthard, Wolfgang Schwanghart, Marco J. Van De Wiel, and Greg Hancock

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Final revised paper (published on 06 Dec 2018)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 18 Oct 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: 'Executive Editor comment on "Global Sensitivity Analysis of Parameter Uncertainty in Landscape Evolution Models"', Astrid Kerkweg, 25 Oct 2017
SC2: 'Response to Executive Editor comment', Tom Coulthard, 29 Oct 2017
RC1: 'Referee Review', Andrew Wickert, 01 Jan 2018
- AC1: 'Quick comment of Referee Review', Christopher Skinner, 03 Jan 2018
- AC2: 'Full Response to Reviewer 1's Comments', Christopher Skinner, 27 Apr 2018
RC2: 'Review of Skinner et al', Daniel Hobley, 17 Apr 2018
- AC3: 'Full Response to Reviewer 2's Comments', Christopher Skinner, 27 Apr 2018

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Christopher Skinner on behalf of the Authors (10 Jul 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (03 Aug 2018) by Bethanna Jackson

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (06 Aug 2018) by Bethanna Jackson

RR by Andy Wickert (19 Aug 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I thank the authors for their careful revisions, which have resulted in an easier-to-understand and, I hope, more impactful manuscript. On reviewing their revised manuscript, I have come up with a much more modest set of comments. These suggestions are either fairly straightforward or minor. At the discretion of the associate editor, I would be happy for the paper to be published without my reviewing the authors' specific responses to these points.

General:
* Include commas where appropriate after "i.e." (treat it as "that is")
* Always include commas after "e.g." (treat it as "for example")
* Consider noting somewhere that form drag is not included (as a general note, this may be paramterized without the bedforms being explicitly modeled)
* Consider making a more specific comment about the grain-size range over which each of these two formulas was developed, and possibly (though only if you find this useful) even including this as horizontal bars or shaded areas in Fig. 2.
* As a general note, I am not sure how clear it is that "Long-term landscape evolution is disproportionally influenced by successive extreme events." Since this is a point in your response, and not in your text, let's leave this as an item for possible future discussion.

Line-by-line comments (line numbers from the "track changes" version

82 (affects 282-284, 491, and more). You change more than just input parameters, right? You also change the functional form of the sediment tranpsort formula.
Later I see that you refer to the sediment transport formula as a parameter. While you use a binary switch to do this, practitioners of data--model intercomparison typically are quite careful to distinguish changes in parameters from changes in functional form.
I suggest that you make it clear up front that you use this as a "parameter" even though it really is different.

142-143. Herman et al. outside parentheses

173. I intuitively think I know what you mean by "second-generation LEMs" (i.e. newer than SIBERIA), but I am not sure about this. Could you help the reader out?

250-251. Grammar

253. "chosen" redundant with "selected"

274. You usually have an article with "CAESAR-Lisflood"; why not here?

311. "which" to "that" or ", which". These have subtly different but occasionally important differences in meaning; I suggest you review this.

210. lowercase "de"

352-354. Maybe you want to be implicit that the step length is 2?

403-406. Start of sentence / transition?

409. by which parameter 9 was altered (end-of-sentence preposition)

447. (I should have caught this earlier. Use actual greater-than-or-equal-to symbols. My pickiness also notes that each values should have a range, though in practicality it is clear what you mean.

690. space after colon

749-750. An alternate/additional set of reasons for this include that (1) the sources of the nonlinearity (e.g., channel width response) are not adequately included in CAESAR-Lisflood, and (2) even if they are/were, these parameters are not tunable in a simple way because their effects depend on other settings.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (23 Aug 2018) by Bethanna Jackson

AR by Christopher Skinner on behalf of the Authors (05 Sep 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (11 Sep 2018) by Bethanna Jackson

AR by Christopher Skinner on behalf of the Authors (19 Sep 2018)

Short summary

Landscape evolution models are computer models used to understand how the Earth’s surface changes over time. Although designed to look at broad changes over very long time periods, they could potentially be used to predict smaller changes over shorter periods. However, to do this we need to better understand how the models respond to changes in their set-up – i.e. their behaviour. This work presents a method which can be applied to these models in order to better understand their behaviour.