An internal solitary wave forecasting model in the northern  South China Sea (ISWFM-NSCS)

Gong, Yankun; Chen, Xueen; Xu, Jiexin; Xie, Jieshuo; Chen, Zhiwu; He, Yinghui; Cai, Shuqun

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-2851-2023

Articles | Volume 16, issue 10

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-2851-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-2851-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 16, issue 10

Model evaluation paper

|

25 May 2023

Model evaluation paper |

| 25 May 2023

An internal solitary wave forecasting model in the northern South China Sea (ISWFM-NSCS)

Yankun Gong, Xueen Chen, Jiexin Xu, Jieshuo Xie, Zhiwu Chen, Yinghui He, and Shuqun Cai

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Final revised paper (published on 25 May 2023)
Preprint (discussion started on 09 Jan 2023)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

RC1:
'Comment on gmd-2022-287', Anonymous Referee #1, 12 Feb 2023

Review of “An internal solitary wave forecasting model in the northern South China Sea (ISWFM-NSCS)” by Gong et al.

Reported is a three-dimensional internal solitary wave forecasting model in the northern South China Sea. The model performance was quantitatively evaluated with mooring observations. A series numerical experiments were implemented to test the choice of horizontal resolution, the minimum number of tidal constituents, as well as background stratification. The work is interesting and the results contribute to the advances of the ISWs modeling in the northern South China Sea. I would like to recommend the manuscript be accepted for publication after very minor technical corrections that are listed as follows:

In this manuscript, “three-dimensional” and “3D” are used interchangeably. Better to make them consistent throughout the text.

Line 17, “precisely” should be changed to “accurately”.

Lines 59-61, “The questions that arise are whether a single tidal constituent can satisfy the reproduction of a real ISW field and how many tidal constituents are required for running an accurate 3D realistic ISW model.” I would suggest to rewrite the sentence as “The questions are whether a single tidal constituent can reproduce a real ISW field and, if not, how many tidal constituents are required for running an accurate 3D realistic ISW model.”

Lines 105-106, “The control run (500m_8HARs) runs at 1 h time interval” is confusing. Did you mean model output at one hour interval?

Lines 126-127, “respectively” should be added to the end of the sentences.

Line 204, “them” should be removed from the sentence.

Line 204, “In terms of wave propagation direction, we obtain by computing the angle …” should be written as “We obtain wave propagation direction by computing the angle …”

Line 382, “HYCOM” should be spelled out in the first time use in the paper. Also, it should be global HYCOM.

Lines 401-402, “… phenomenon, of which maximum amplitudes happen in the ocean interior” should be written as “… phenomenon, with maximum amplitudes in the ocean interior”.

Line 406, “does” should be changed to “did”.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2022-287-RC1
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Yankun Gong, 13 Feb 2023
  
  We would like to thank the referee for this careful reading and valuable comments. In the revision, we have carefully considered them, and the necessary changes are provided to address them. Please find our point-by-point responses to your comments in the supplementary file.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2022-287-AC1
CEC1:
'Comment on gmd-2022-287', Juan Antonio Añel, 10 Mar 2023

Dear authors,

Unfortunately, after checking your manuscript, it has come to our attention that it does not comply with our "Code and Data Policy".
https://www.geoscientific-model-development.net/policies/code_and_data_policy.html
You have archived your code (the MITgcm model) on GitHub and MIT servers. However, these are not acceptable repositories. You must store the code used in your manuscript in other long-term archival alternatives, such as Zenodo, PANGAEA, etc.

Therefore, you must reply to this comment with the relevant information (link and DOI) for the new repositories, as we request that you make it already available before submission and, of course, before the Discussions stage.

Moreover, you must include in a potentially revised version of your manuscript the modified 'Code and Data Availability' section, with the DOI of the code.

Please, be aware that failing to comply with this request could result in rejecting your manuscript for publication.
--

Juan A. Añel

Geosci. Model Dev. Exec. Editor

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2022-287-CEC1
- AC2: 'Reply on CEC1', Yankun Gong, 13 Mar 2023
  
  We appreciate your comments on our code repository. According to your suggestion, we have read the code and data policy of GMD in detail, and have added all model code on the Zenodo repository with the DOI number https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6792999.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2022-287-AC2
CC1:
'Comment on gmd-2022-287', GuangHong Liao, 26 Mar 2023
The article simulated the propagation of internal solitary wavevs in the northern South China Sea using a three-dimensional ISW forecasting model. The results are compared with satellite in situ mooring observations, showing good consistency. A series of sensitivity experiments are conducted to further study effects of model resolution, tidal forcing, and stratification selection on the model simulations. This article is very well written, and the detailed analysis in this article show robust conclusions. This has the potential to advance our understanding of developing an internal solitary waves real-time forecasting system. Therefore, I recommend this article to be published in Geoscientific Model Development with very minor revisions. My suggestions are listed below.
Lines 89-91 and 391-400: The authors used the spatially averaged temperature and salinity profiles from WOA18 as the initial condition for the 3D model simualtion. In the section of ‘discussion and conclusions’, the authors discussed that the spatially varying stratification needs to be consider in the future work. Using the spatially varying stratification is easy to be implemented and will not increase the computational resources. I wonder if this can be included in this work. In addition, WOA18 is a climatology dataset, a three-dimensional temperature and salinity profiles from high resolution ocean reanalysis, such as HYCOM, GLORYS and BRAN2020, may give a better performance of the control run.

Lines 96-97: Why not use spatially varying Coriolis parameters? Are the model results sensitive to this parameter?

Lines 104-105: As the model is initiated from the spatially averaged temperature and salinity profiles, is the model integrated time (3-day) enough for the 3D ocean model to reach a steady state?

Line 126: Because the mooring will fluctuate in the water, I do not think the CTD sensors can be fixed at 1 m which is too close to the sea surface.

Lines 173-175: How do you calculate the crestline lengths. Are there several biases for your estimation?

Lines 176-177: ‘As the model …… between them’. Will these factors impact the ISW parameters that calculated from the MODIS images?

Lines 184-186: Can you estimate the exact propagation speed of the ISWs occurred during 8 August-14 August? If so, you can get more accurate time for the ISWs to propagate from the generation site to the targeted station.

Lines 354-357: Do these eight tidal constituents play the same role in the model simulation? I wonder whether we need all these eight tidal constituents?

Lines 412-414: The authors chose three different horizontal model resolutions (250 m, 500 m and 1000 m) and compared the model simulations. I wonder if the higher the horizontal model resolution is, the better the model will perform. What about the vertical model resolutions?

Figures 6-9: In Figs. 6f, 7f, 8h and 9, the labels should be Real N2 instead of Real N².
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2022-287-CC1
- AC3:
  'Reply on CC1', Yankun Gong, 12 Apr 2023
  
  We would like to thank the referee for this careful reading and valuable comments. In the revision, we have carefully considered them, and the necessary changes are provided to address them. Please find our point-by-point responses to your comments in the supplementary file.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2022-287-AC3
  - CC2: 'Reply on AC3', GuangHong Liao, 18 Apr 2023
    
    I have confirmed that the revised manuscript addressed all my comments to the first review. Thus, I would like to recommend the publication in the Geoscientific Model Development.
    .
    
    Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2022-287-CC2

Peer review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision | EF: Editorial file upload

AR by Yankun Gong on behalf of the Authors (22 Apr 2023) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (24 Apr 2023) by Heather Hyewon Kim

AR by Yankun Gong on behalf of the Authors (25 Apr 2023) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (25 Apr 2023) by Heather Hyewon Kim

AR by Yankun Gong on behalf of the Authors (26 Apr 2023) Manuscript

Short summary

Internal solitary waves (ISWs) play crucial roles in mass transport and ocean mixing in the northern South China Sea. Massive numerical investigations have been conducted in this region, but there was no systematic evaluation of a three-dimensional model about precisely simulating ISWs. Here, an ISW forecasting model is employed to evaluate the roles of resolution, tidal forcing and stratification in accurately reproducing wave properties via comparison to field and remote-sensing observations.