A General Lake Model (GLM 3.0) for linking with high-frequency sensor data from the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON)

Hipsey, Matthew R.; Bruce, Louise C.; Boon, Casper; Busch, Brendan; Carey, Cayelan C.; Hamilton, David P.; Hanson, Paul C.; Read, Jordan S.; de Sousa, Eduardo; Weber, Michael; Winslow, Luke A.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-473-2019

Articles | Volume 12, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-473-2019

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-473-2019

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

Articles | Volume 12, issue 1

Model description paper

|

29 Jan 2019

Model description paper |

| 29 Jan 2019

A General Lake Model (GLM 3.0) for linking with high-frequency sensor data from the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON)

Matthew R. Hipsey, Louise C. Bruce, Casper Boon, Brendan Busch, Cayelan C. Carey, David P. Hamilton, Paul C. Hanson, Jordan S. Read, Eduardo de Sousa, Michael Weber, and Luke A. Winslow

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Final revised paper (published on 29 Jan 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 20 Nov 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review Hipsey et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 25 Nov 2017
- AC2: 'Updated manuscript and initial replies', Matthew Hipsey, 08 Jan 2018
EC1: 'Editor Comment', Simon Unterstrasser, 26 Nov 2017
SC1: 'Code Accessability.', Lutz Gross, 13 Dec 2017
- AC3: 'code accessibility via DOI', Matthew Hipsey, 08 Jan 2018
RC2: 'Anonymous review of Hipsey et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 03 Jan 2018
- AC4: 'Reply to Referee #2', Matthew Hipsey, 22 Jan 2018
RC3: 'Review of Hipsey et al.', Anonymous Referee #3, 08 Jan 2018
- AC5: 'Reply to Referee #3', Matthew Hipsey, 23 Jan 2018
AC1: 'Preliminary Revision - updated manuscript download', Matthew Hipsey, 08 Jan 2018
AC6: 'Final response following discussion', Matthew Hipsey, 25 Jan 2018

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Matthew Hipsey on behalf of the Authors (08 Mar 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (12 Mar 2018) by Simon Unterstrasser

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (22 Mar 2018)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (03 Apr 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I appreciate the work that has been done on this revision. The layer splitting and merging scheme is now much better described and makes sense (end of p. 4 to middle of p. 6). The big Table 1, even though it might feel excessive, makes sure that everything has its proper definition and units. I still have some comments, mostly minor, and will recommend publication contingent on minor revision, even though I feel like I still haven’t sufficiently combed the equations for inconsistencies.

Some things that I still consider somewhat major:

1. P. 5, 1st paragraph: This starts to explain the split/merge scheme, and refers to Fig. 1, which doesn’t show layers at all. You might want to add a separate figure that schematically shows a split and a merge. Fig. 1 can also benefit from having sensible heat flux included. So you’ll want to reference the current Fig. 1 for the processes that lead to splitting and merging, and another figure (or panel) for the split/merge scheme itself.
2. The paragraph on p. 8, lines 9-13 is a rather good example of a brief description of the general concept that the following sub-sub-sections will fill in. Other sections should have more like this.
3. Eqs. 37 and 38 are some that I decided to take a fairly close look at. In eq. 37, it seems to have the correct units, but the only thing in the equation that is suggestive of a wave number is the K-H billow length, which only has a single value, and other terms don’t even have that. The “per wave number” part of the definition suggests that you might be able to do an integral across wave numbers to get a value per mass, but I’m not seeing how this works. In eq. 38, the units don’t work out right. The part inside the brackets seems to have the right units (meters squared per second squared), but then is multiplied by a length.
4. Table 1 should have an explanation in the header that says that a hyphen in the units column means no units. This made me ask myself what a hyphen in the value column means, and I don’t think it is all that consistent. Some are distinctly independent variables (t and z). Some indicate the space-time location of a feature of the system (such as t sub b and H). To what extent might these be characterized as calculated? [t] seems to be more of a device used in coding the algorithm. E sub TKE and E sub PE seem more clearly to be calculated. U sub 10 seems to be time-series input (observed). e sub * is altogether undefined in the table. E sub PE seems like it should be defined as potential energy within the stratified water column *per mass*, but see the previous comment about eq. 38.
5. Fig. 10: The inset should have a better 3-D effect. Consult an expert to add color and sheen so that it is unambiguous which direction each surface points. I don’t understand why alpha sub inf is called a “half angle”. It’s the angle between the two sloping sides of the idealized river channel, right?

Minor comments:

1. P. 3, lines 12-14: I hesitate to call FLake a 1-D model. Maybe more like 0.5-D, because of its predefined shapes of temperature profile curves.
2. P. 3, line 26: It would be more convincing that GLEON is a large group if you explicitly state a number of participants.
3. P. 6, line 3: This sentence seems very confusing. When you say energy, to you mean heat energy, TKE, or something else? Density instability promotes mixing, so it doesn’t make sense to overcome instability to trigger mixing. And “accounting for” can be taken as either a cause or an effect; I’d rather see it expressed more explicitly as an effect of mixing.
4. Hyphen police: See my previous comments. P. 6, line 19: “Well mixed” is an adverb + adjective, so should not have a hyphen. Captions to Figs. 2 and 5: “Time series” should have no hyphen. P. 14, line 2: “Length scale” without a hyphen.
5. P. 6, line 27: The word “latent” should be before “heat flux”.
6. Eqs. 5 and 6: It seems that you are defining the water level as the level of liquid water if no ice were displacing it, while ice thickness is simply ice volume/area. In other words, when freezing occurs, water is withdrawn from the top layer of liquid water and transferred to the ice layer. This needs to be very explicit in order to understand these equations.
7. P 8, line 10: “Uppermost” should be one word.
8. P. 8, line 13: I don’t think you’ve defined “RHS”. Some might know this, but perhaps not all.
9. P. 10, eq. 13: Is zenith-angle dependence already built into the definition of incoming light? Otherwise direct sunlight should have this formula with z divided by the cosine of the zenith angle, and diffuse light should use some effective average zenith angle.
10. P. 10, line 11: “Adsorption” refers to material being incorporated; for radiation, it should be “absorption”.
11. P. 12, line 9: Add “water vapour” before “mixing ratio”.
12. The journal's spelling standard apparently is British English, and this manuscript mostly follows that, but I noticed at least one occurrence of “vapor” on p. 16, line 2.
13. P. 12, eq. 23b: Is there a citation for August-Roche-Magnus?
14. P. 13, line 4: I’m not sure whether “within the internal boundary layer” implies that you need to define an internal boundary-layer height and measure at multiple heights within that range, or whether it only needs to be measured near the surface.
15. P. 15, last line: “Penetrative” misspelled.
16. P. 20, line 12: The formula at the beginning of this line should be multiplied by g.
17. P. 23, line 11: There should be a semi-colon before “however”.
18. P. 25, line 9: Phi sub inf should be the angle of slope. I think this is better than just saying “slope” which is often expressed as a ratio, and I think “tangent” here is unintentional.
19. The citation and the reference give different dates for Makler-Pick et al.
20. Mueller et al. (2016) is out of alphabetical order.
21. Snortheim et al. is missing a date.
22. Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) needs to be alphabetized according to the way that it is stated in the citations. It is not alphabetized correctly for either “TVA” or “Tennessee Valley Authority”. I suggest leaving the citations as they are and alphabetizing it as “TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority)”.

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ED: Reconsider after major revisions (03 Apr 2018) by Simon Unterstrasser

AR by Matthew Hipsey on behalf of the Authors (26 Jun 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (13 Jul 2018) by Simon Unterstrasser

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (23 Aug 2018)

RR by Anonymous Referee #4 (07 Sep 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Overview

The manuscript describes the one-dimensional hydrodynamic lake model GLM, which has been widely adopted by the scientific community. The model represents a tremendous effort in lake modelling which needs to be well documented. As such, it falls within the scope of this journal. The paper is well written and structured. It gives a comprehensive overview of the model structure and equations, while available tools for pre and post-processing and for linking the model to other models are described.

The current version is the third version submitted by the authors and corrects most of the errors and structural deficiencies and inconsistencies fond in the previous versions. In that sense, the authors have done a remarkable work. I’m also glad that, although it is besides the scope of the manuscript, the authors have improved the GLM web page. Since great part of the deficiencies of the previous versions have already been corrected and the review process can’t be eternal, I only have some specific comments to do.

Specific comments

P10L12: Kw is set as a fix value (variable if the model is couple with a WQ model, ie: AED2). This value have a no-negligible effect into the stratification and temperature evolution of the lakes. Most users have series of Kw (or Secchi disk), so it would be interesting to implement Kw as an input time series in the future versions of the model. Just a suggestion.

Figure4a: The 2D map is not a direct result of the model. For that figure, the authors assume horizontal homogeneity of Kw. Not sure if it is a good idea to interpreter in a 2D map the results of a 1D model. In any case, what is the lake’s size?

P13L16: Does it implies that the origin of the meteorological date must be within the lake to apply the corrections for non-neutral atmospheric stability? Shore? If so, please specify.

P24L7 & Fig.8. It would be interesting to include a (g) panel to include the effect of K-H mixing by splitting the layers from the (f) panel to have a more visual effect.

P28L14: How is calculated the temperature of the local runoff?

P33L14: What about an adaptive height water withdrawal? That would be useful for some reservoir management.

End of review

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (11 Sep 2018) by Simon Unterstrasser

AR by Matthew Hipsey on behalf of the Authors (22 Sep 2018) Author's response

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (18 Oct 2018) by Simon Unterstrasser

AR by Matthew Hipsey on behalf of the Authors (27 Oct 2018) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

The General Lake Model (GLM) has been developed to undertake simulation of a diverse range of wetlands, lakes, and reservoirs. The model supports the science needs of the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON), a network of lake sensors and researchers attempting to understand lake functioning and address questions about how lakes around the world vary in response to climate and land use change. The paper describes the science basis and application of the model.