A hydrological cycle model for the Globally Resolved Energy Balance (GREB) model v1.0

Stassen, Christian; Dommenget, Dietmar; Loveday, Nicholas

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-425-2019

Articles | Volume 12, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-425-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-425-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 12, issue 1

Development and technical paper

|

24 Jan 2019

Development and technical paper |

| 24 Jan 2019

A hydrological cycle model for the Globally Resolved Energy Balance (GREB) model v1.0

Christian Stassen, Dietmar Dommenget, and Nicholas Loveday

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Final revised paper (published on 24 Jan 2019)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 18 Jun 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review on A Hydrological Cycle Model for the Globally Resolved Energy Balance Model (GREB) v1.0', Anonymous Referee #1, 18 Jul 2018
RC2: 'review of gmd-2018-131', Anonymous Referee #2, 19 Jul 2018
RC3: 'review of gmd-2018-131, minor comments', Anonymous Referee #2, 19 Jul 2018
AC1: 'Response to RC1, RC2 and RC3', Christian Stassen, 05 Oct 2018

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Christian Stassen on behalf of the Authors (31 Oct 2018)

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (02 Nov 2018) by Min-Hui Lo

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (05 Nov 2018)

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (19 Nov 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The study improves upon a rudimentary hydrology component of a simple and efficient global climate model (GREB). Upon reading such a paper, I would like to know
1. What is GREB and why is it unique?
2. Why is there a need to develop hydrology component, if it might add to its complexity (which goes against the development choice of the original GREB)
3. Justification for the choice of variables to be simulated and parameterization, and detailed description of the methods
4. Quantified improvement over the previous version, comparison against other models, and evaluation against observations.

The paper has been reviewed before, and most of the previous reviewer concerns have been addressed by the authors. In doing so, most of my above concerns have been already addressed by the authors. Below are a few suggestions that I believe would help improve the presentation.

Hydrological cycle is a loaded term. Usually, it refers to water cycling between land and ocean and atmospheric reservoirs. Thus, it has fluxes and storages. Since you only simulate a few selected fluxes (and exclude storage and other fluxes such as runoff), I would suggest adding a short justification on why these three fluxes are important and providing an acknowledgement and justification for not implementing other fluxes and storage terms (perhaps in order to maintain the speed and simplicity of the model). Due to this, I suggest replacing 'hydrological cycle' with 'hydrology variables' wherever possible, and 'hydrological cycle model' to 'hydrology component' of GREB.

P2 Ln 3: Avoid use of 'like' since it is ambiguous and somewhat informal. Suggested alternative: 'such as'.

P2 Ln 9: GREB abbreviation appears before the complete name (Ln 11)
Suggested minor text flow changes:
First introduce GREB model, describe what is unique about it (it is fast and simple), describe its hydrology component and what it is lacking, and the need to upgrade it.

P2 Ln 17: keep one tense (present) consistent throughout the paper. Avoid using future tense, since you have already finished the study, not proposing to do so.

P2 Ln 26: Surface -> 'land and ocean surface'

Ln 25 onwards on P2: Outputs from GREB are described but not the input. Again, suggest a text flow change: describe GREB, what is unique about it, what are the forcing fields and what are the output fields. Then describe it logistics- time step, datasets used for forcing etc.

P3 Ln3: Write the full name of CMIP5, since this is the first time in the article text that you are referring to it.

P3 Ln 16: At this point in the paper, it is unclear why precipitation observations are used. Please supplement the sentence with a short explanation.

Figure 3: What specific metric is used to denote the seasonal cycle? Please explain.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (19 Nov 2018) by Min-Hui Lo

AR by Christian Stassen on behalf of the Authors (29 Nov 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (06 Dec 2018) by Min-Hui Lo

AR by Christian Stassen on behalf of the Authors (14 Dec 2018) Manuscript

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Short summary

In this research article, we describe the development of a new model for the water cycle (evaporation, precipitation and transport) for a simple climate model called GREB. Before this work, the water cycle in GREB was merely a dummy. We compare our simple model against more complex models and find a similar skill. The results illustrate that the new GREB model's water cycle is a useful tool to study the changes of the water cycle to external forcings like El Niño or climate change.