Land surface model influence on the simulated climatologies of temperature and precipitation extremes in the WRF v3.9 model over North America

García-García, Almudena; Cuesta-Valero, Francisco José; Beltrami, Hugo; González-Rouco, Fidel; García-Bustamante, Elena; Finnis, Joel

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-5345-2020

Articles | Volume 13, issue 11

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-5345-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-5345-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 11

Model evaluation paper

|

05 Nov 2020

Model evaluation paper |

| 05 Nov 2020

Land surface model influence on the simulated climatologies of temperature and precipitation extremes in the WRF v3.9 model over North America

Almudena García-García, Francisco José Cuesta-Valero, Hugo Beltrami, Fidel González-Rouco, Elena García-Bustamante, and Joel Finnis

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Final revised paper (published on 05 Nov 2020)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 20 Apr 2020)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Review for gmd-2020-86: “Land Surface Model influence on the simulated climatologies of temperature and precipitation extremes in the WRF v.3.9 model over North America” by García-García et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 28 May 2020
- AC1: 'Response to Referee #1', Almudena García-García, 14 Jul 2020
RC2: 'Referee Comment', Anonymous Referee #2, 04 Jun 2020
- AC2: 'Response to Referee #2', Almudena García-García, 14 Jul 2020

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Almudena García-García on behalf of the Authors (14 Jul 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (23 Jul 2020) by Paul Ullrich

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (08 Aug 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I believe the authors have sufficiently responded to my reviews. The changes they have made based on both reviewers have improved the paper, and beyond a few technical corrections the paper is ready for publication.

Line 25: confirm "that" all of these...

Line 34: of is typed two times, one needs to be removed.

Line 49: I believe it should be snow cover, not snow covers.

Paragraph staring on line 67: As ERA5 and MERRA2 have been published for a while now, a brief description of how their land surface components are treated should be included.

Line 225: Would be better worded as: "agreeing in seasonality and broadly in the regional classification of energy and water limited areas (e.g. areas with high probability of episodes where atmospheric forcing or soil conditions control land-atmosphere interactions).

I appreciate the inclusion of the discussion of how land-use differences and snow cover could lead to differences LA coupling in the models. I think, however, you need to be more careful with your language about cause/effect. e.g. on line 381 you say "representation of vegetation cover are causing". To really know if this was the cause i think sensitivity tests where the land cover type is changed in each model would need to be done. You could change the language to "likely play a role" or "influence" in these cases, but directly stating "cause" is beyond the scope of this analysis.

Line 458: I am confused by the confusion of "ocean parameterizations" here. In these RCM simulations the ocean is just a boundary condition provided by the GCM. The way the boundary layer responds to the ocean and fluxes are calculated will be different, but those are not really ocean parameterizations. I suggest removing "ocean parameterizations" here and add it to "treatment of boundary conditions, including sea surface temperatures over the ocean"

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RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (12 Aug 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

In their paper “Land Surface Model influence on the simulated climatologies of temperature and precipitation extremes in the WRF v.3.9 model over North America”, the authors present an analysis of 4 WRF simulations run over North America over the same period, with each simulation using a different land surface model. Their study is clear and interesting, and serves not only to highlight the importance of land-atmosphere coupling on temperature and precipitation extremes, but also to demonstrate that while topography and the atmosphere itself do play a first order role in controlling extremes over land, the choice of land surface model itself can be a source of substantial spread.

The authors have done an excellent job addressing the concerns raised during the last round of revision, and the manuscript and figures have improved in their readability and clarity. I have only minor comments, noted below.

Line 290 / Figure 4: I feel the need to still push back at calling a region that covers the north-eastern corner of Canada and does not cover Greenland “Greenland”. While I understand that the authors want to be consistent with the domains of a referenced study, they should at least acknowledge that the domain does not include Greenland and they’re only calling it that for ease of comparison to Giorgi and Francisco (whose domain did actually include Greenland, unlike this study’s domain).

Line 245: I appreciate the inclusion of more discussion on why each VAC category is occurring for each model (e.g. the low latent heat fluxes in CLM4 during winter). It would be even MORE helpful if the authors could identify what aspects of each LSM were resulting in the observed fluxes that control the VAC category, though they do allude to variations in representations of plants and snow.

Methodological comment: I still think it would be really useful to see the difference in spread in results that occurs from using multiple ensemble members of a single LSM-WRF setup (e.g. multiple NOAH-WRF simulations) vs the spread across 4 single instantiations of 4 different LSM-WRF simulations. I understand that that is computationally expensive, and don’t think it is required for the publication of this study, but if the authors choose to further pursue the questions they raised in this study, explicitly quantifying the spread in an ensemble of single LSM-WRF runs and comparing that to the spread in WRF runs across multiple LSMs would (a) be interesting and (b) if the single LSM-WRF spread proves to be small, make the results presented in this study more robust.

Minor typos:

Line 85: “examinate” should be “examine”

Line 173/174: “increases” and “decreases” should be “increasing” and “decreasing”

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (21 Aug 2020) by Paul Ullrich

AR by Almudena García-García on behalf of the Authors (28 Aug 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (06 Sep 2020) by Paul Ullrich

AR by Almudena García-García on behalf of the Authors (12 Sep 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (01 Oct 2020) by Paul Ullrich