TITAM (v1.0): the Time-Independent Tracking  Algorithm for Medicanes

Pravia-Sarabia, Enrique; Gómez-Navarro, Juan José; Jiménez-Guerrero, Pedro; Montávez, Juan Pedro

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-6051-2020

Articles | Volume 13, issue 12

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-6051-2020

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-6051-2020

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

Articles | Volume 13, issue 12

Model description paper

|

02 Dec 2020

Model description paper |

| 02 Dec 2020

TITAM (v1.0): the Time-Independent Tracking Algorithm for Medicanes

Enrique Pravia-Sarabia, Juan José Gómez-Navarro, Pedro Jiménez-Guerrero, and Juan Pedro Montávez

Download

Final revised paper (published on 02 Dec 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 24 Jun 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

RC1: 'Major revision', Anonymous Referee #1, 14 Jul 2020
- AC1: 'Responses to comments of Anonymous Referee #1', Juan Pedro Montavez, 15 Sep 2020
RC2: 'Peer review for Manuscript number: gmd-2020-149', Anonymous Referee #2, 22 Aug 2020
- AC2: 'Responses to comments of Anonymous Referee #2', Juan Pedro Montavez, 15 Sep 2020

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Juan Pedro Montavez on behalf of the Authors (15 Sep 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (25 Sep 2020) by Patrick Jöckel

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (01 Oct 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The paper has considerably improved with respect to the previous version: a few further comments are included herafter.

Specific comments
L6: “the fact that the former ones appear in baroclinic environments makes them prone to maintain their warm-cored and symmetric structure for short time periods”: really, also the limited extension of the Mediterranean basin contributes.
L10: based -> basing
L93-95: “the existence of two different low pressure areas is equivalent to the existence of two medicanes”: the sentence is still confusing, thus I suggest to change it, for example, following your previous answer, into “searching for two medicanes is technically the same as searching for two low pressure areas”.
L195: I think it would be clearer to change “in those cases where the medicane perturbation is largely modulated by orographic factors” into “in those cases where SLP perturbations occur due to orographic factors”.
L202: you should stress here that, due to the definition of vorticity, the threshold you selected depends on the grid spacing you used;
L243: higher or lower?
L284: the former being usually greater …
L354: really the value B = 10 m is appropriate for a radius of 500 km, thus one may question whether this value is appropriate for a much smaller radius. Figure 8 apparently supports this point.
Figure 5 caption: it is not clear what is the latitude of the zonal cross section: that passing through the SLP minimum? through the position of the cyclone? or another one?
L383: what do you mean here with “instability”?
L397 and Figure 7 caption: large plus symbols, respectively … (I do not see any red plus in the Mediterranean)
L422: I tried hard to understand why the track of CY (reaching Crete in Fig. 9) stopped so early in Fig. 10. It seems that the explanation is provided at the end (“the algorithm does not follow the SYNOPTIC low since it does not satisfy other conditions such as the symmetry”): is my interpretation right? Consider to anticipate the explanation earlier.
L453: the selected examples …

Comment on the previous answer
Neither Miglietta et al. (2013) nor Tous and Romero (2013) (which Miglietta et al. (2013) cite for the medicanes radius) seem to provide a clear definition of how the measure the medicane radius.
Miglietta et al. (2013) state (final sentence at page 2401) that “After several trials and errors, here the radius is chosen considering the extension of the warm core anomaly at 600 hPa, as implicitly suggested by Hart”.

Hide

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (02 Oct 2020) by Patrick Jöckel

AR by Juan Pedro Montavez on behalf of the Authors (09 Oct 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (13 Oct 2020) by Patrick Jöckel

AR by Juan Pedro Montavez on behalf of the Authors (13 Oct 2020)

Short summary

This work shows TITAM, a time-independent tracking algorithm specifically suited for Mediterranean tropical-like cyclones, often referred to as medicanes. The methodology developed has the capacity to track multiple simultaneous cyclones, the ability to track a medicane in the presence of intense extratropical lows, and the potential to separate the medicane from other similar structures by handling the intermittent loss of structure and managing the tilting of the axis.