A land surface model combined with a crop growth model for paddy rice (MATCRO-Rice v. 1) – Part 2: Model validation

Masutomi, Yuji; Ono, Keisuke; Takimoto, Takahiro; Mano, Masayoshi; Maruyama, Atsushi; Miyata, Akira

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-9-4155-2016

Articles | Volume 9, issue 11

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-9-4155-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-9-4155-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 9, issue 11

Model evaluation paper

|

21 Nov 2016

Model evaluation paper |

| 21 Nov 2016

A land surface model combined with a crop growth model for paddy rice (MATCRO-Rice v. 1) – Part 2: Model validation

Yuji Masutomi, Keisuke Ono, Takahiro Takimoto, Masayoshi Mano, Atsushi Maruyama, and Akira Miyata

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Final revised paper (published on 21 Nov 2016)
Preprint (discussion started on 19 Feb 2016)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of “A land surface model combined with a crop growth model for paddy rice (MATCRO-Rice Ver. 1) – Part II: Model validation” by Masutomi et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 08 Apr 2016
- AC1: 'Response to Anonymous Referee #1 (gmd-2016-29)', Yuji Masutomi, 19 May 2016
RC2: 'Review of Masutomi et al. A land surface model combined with a crop growth model for paddy rice (MATCRO-Rice Ver. 1) – Part II: Model validation', C. Müller, 18 Apr 2016
- AC2: 'Response to C. Muller (gmd-2016-29)', Yuji Masutomi, 19 May 2016

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Yuji Masutomi on behalf of the Authors (15 Jul 2016) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (19 Jul 2016) by Tomomichi Kato

RR by Christoph Müller (01 Aug 2016)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have made some effort to actually supply an evaluation of model performance against independent data, which I acknowledge. Generally the paper reads fine. I would suggest extracting much of the numeric information that is given in the text (e.g. RMSE values for different model versions for 4 years and the 4-year mean or parameter values) into one table which would make a comparison across settings much easier.

The assessment of yields lacks some important detail on how simulated crop yields were aggregated (average without area weight?) and a simple average across grid-cells with any part of Japan in it does not seem to be the right approach to aggregate simulated yields. This should be clarified and – if needed – rectified.

The explanation of incorrect simulated surface temperatures under omission of flooded areas as the main reason why MATCRO works better than MATSIRO does not hold for 2003, where the MATCRO-RF version is closer to observed surface T than the MATCRO version, whereas SHF and LHF fluxes are simulated better by MATCRO than MATCRO-RF in all cases. So the underlying mechanism seems to be a bit more complicated than that and should be discussed in that way.

In several places units are missing or parameters are listed within the text where it’s not clear to which equations these would actually refer to. If all these equations are in the companion paper, could readers be referred to these?

I still think that this paper could well be merged with the companion paper, but if the editor and authors see this differently I’m happy to concur.

Detailed comments:
* P1, L1: two types of validation
* P3, L3: please provide units. I suppose it’s 1800 seconds?
* P5, L5: I suggest saying “biomass partitioning” throughout as not only glucose is partitioned
* P6, L24 “photosynthetic active radiation”
* P8, L24: what kind of averaging was used? I would expect that there is some area weighting with rice harvested area per grid cell, but as there is no mentioning of any land-use input data, this does not seem to be the case? National crop yield statistics certainly reflect the inhomogeneous distribution of cropland within the country and therefore the aggregation of simulated data should as well.
* P8, L30 “can reproduce variability correctly” is possibly stretching it a bit… maybe rephrase to something like “can substantial shares of weather-induced variability” (even though you don’t know how much of the observed variability is actually weather-driven).
* P9, L13: This is not an equation but a parameter? For what equation?
* P9, L29: "correctly" seems to overrate the skill here. MATCRO-RF is "more correct" in 2003?
* Figures 15 and 16: The RMSE values given refer to MATCRO or MATCRO-RF? Why don’t you supply both as in Fig 17?

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RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (06 Sep 2016)

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (06 Sep 2016) by Tomomichi Kato

AR by Yuji Masutomi on behalf of the Authors (16 Oct 2016) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (07 Nov 2016) by Tomomichi Kato

AR by Yuji Masutomi on behalf of the Authors (07 Nov 2016) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

We conducted two types of validation for the simulations by MATCRO-Rice developed by Masutomi et al. (2016). The results of the validation indicate that MATCRO-Rice has a high ability to accurately and consistently simulate latent heat flux, sensible heat flux, net carbon uptake by crops, and crop yield.