Using the anomaly forcing Community Land Model (CLM 4.5) for crop yield projections

Lu, Yaqiong; Yang, Xianyu

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-1253-2021

Articles | Volume 14, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-1253-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-1253-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 14, issue 3

Model evaluation paper

|

08 Mar 2021

Model evaluation paper |

| 08 Mar 2021

Using the anomaly forcing Community Land Model (CLM 4.5) for crop yield projections

Yaqiong Lu and Xianyu Yang

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Final revised paper (published on 08 Mar 2021)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 24 Aug 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

RC1: 'Comments to gmd-2020-186', Anonymous Referee #1, 26 Oct 2020
- AC2: 'Reply on RC1', Yaqiong Lu, 10 Jan 2021
RC2: 'Review of gmd-2020-186', Anonymous Referee #2, 02 Dec 2020
- AC1: 'Reply on RC2', Yaqiong Lu, 10 Jan 2021

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Mario Ebel on behalf of the Authors (14 Jan 2021) Author's response

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (14 Jan 2021) by Christoph Müller

Dear Dr. Lu and Dr. Yang,

thank you for revising the manuscript in accordance with the reviewers' advise.
Some of the comments have, however, only been answered in the response letter but did not lead to any changes in the manuscript so that readers may have similar questions as the reviewers but do not see the answers. Please also modify the manuscript to provide the clarifications provided in the response letter. Examples include:
* reviewer1, area weighting in aggregates
* reviewer1, computational costs
* reviewer1, masking of insignificant areas in Figure 2d-i
* reviewer2, bottom atmosphere layer
* reviewer2, ratio 5

I disagree with the speculation on how the annomaly forcing will work in CLM5.0. New model features, such as fertilization schemes may improve the general ability of the model to reproduce observed crop yield levels, but that also was not reported as a problem in the standard forcing setup. I see that reviewer1 asked for some speculation on how this would perform with CLM5.0, but I would recommend to clearly mark this as speculation and suggest that the annomaly forcing will have to be tested for suitability in any new version of CLM and for the specific research question under investigation (e.g. if the interest is in absolute yield levels or in qualitative differences).

The new Figure S1 does not provide the unit of changes shown. All other figures mention the unit in the figure caption, but I would generally recommend to include units with the legend bar within the figures, as these may be used in presentations or similar and missing units can lead to confusion.

You provide a path to the anomaly forcing source code, but don't explicitly say that this (presumably?) refers to the code given in the zenodo archive. Please add information on where that path can be found.

I'm happy to accept the manuscript as soon as these points have been addressed.

Best regards
Christoph

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AR by Yaqiong Lu on behalf of the Authors (20 Jan 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (21 Jan 2021) by Christoph Müller

Short summary

Crop growth in land surface models normally requires high-temporal-resolution climate data, but such high-temporal-resolution climate data are not provided by many climate model simulations due to expensive storage, which limits modeling choices if there is an interest in a particular climate simulation that only saved monthly outputs. Our work provides an alternative way to use the monthly climate for crop yield projections. Such an approach could be easily adopted by other crop models.