Improvement in the decadal prediction skill of the North Atlantic extratropical winter circulation through increased model resolution

Schuster, Mareike; Grieger, Jens; Richling, Andy; Schartner, Thomas; Illing, Sebastian; Kadow, Christopher; Müller, Wolfgang A.; Pohlmann, Holger; Pfahl, Stephan; Ulbrich, Uwe

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-10-901-2019

Articles | Volume 10, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-10-901-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-10-901-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 10, issue 4

Research article

|

17 Dec 2019

Research article |

| 17 Dec 2019

Improvement in the decadal prediction skill of the North Atlantic extratropical winter circulation through increased model resolution

Mareike Schuster, Jens Grieger, Andy Richling, Thomas Schartner, Sebastian Illing, Christopher Kadow, Wolfgang A. Müller, Holger Pohlmann, Stephan Pfahl, and Uwe Ulbrich

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Final revised paper (published on 17 Dec 2019)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 30 Apr 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #1, 30 May 2019
- AC1: 'Response to Comments of Anonymous Referee #1 [R1]', Mareike Schuster, 10 Jul 2019
RC2: 'referee comment on Improvement in the decadal prediction skill of the northern hemisphere extra-tropical winter circulation through increased model resolution by Schuster et al', Anonymous Referee #2, 03 Jun 2019
- AC2: 'Response to Comments of Anonymous Referee #2 [R2]', Mareike Schuster, 10 Jul 2019
AC1: 'Response to Comments of Anonymous Referee #1 [R1]', Mareike Schuster, 10 Jul 2019

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (14 Jul 2019) by Gerrit Lohmann

AR by Mareike Schuster on behalf of the Authors (25 Aug 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (26 Aug 2019) by Gerrit Lohmann

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (13 Sep 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The revised manuscript is clearer, the authors have satisfactorily addressed most of comments given in the first review. In particular, the methods are much better described. Figure 4 added to the revised manuscript shows a remarkable improvement in the characteristics of cyclones in HR version of the model.

Discussion section should be modified - currently it is three page long and is not very sharp. I recommend breaking it into a few parts (maybe 3-4).

I find that the paper may be accepted for publication subject to technical revision.

Minor comments:
p.1,l. 3: remove “as well as”
p1,l.5: remove “each”; say “in ensembles of 5 members in …”
p2, l1-3 : “fluctuations in the circulation and thus i.a. the frequency of extremes such as strong cyclones, intense windstorms or phases of blocked flow “ this is hard to read, consider revising
p2,l5 : remove “and harm”
p2, l9: remove “itself”
p2,l27: “which exists irrespective of the ocean initialization technique (Moemken et al., 2016) “ - either remove or rephrase the sentence
p2, l33: “the European North Sea “ - I am not aware of a non-European North Sea
p.7, l8: Laplace?
p.11,l24: capable of representing
p.11,l.26: I’d recommend “dynamics … benefits”
p.16, l15: “persits” should read “persist”; “the North Pacific blocking, the North Atlantic blocking“
p.16, l27L: “The proportion of the bias of a) the different reanalysis used in Kruschke et al. 2014 and b) the model physics, that has since been further developed, is negligible (not shown). “ - review this sentence
p16,l33: “This bias cannot be corrected …” - sounds as if there was some obvious reason for that. Either explain or rephrase.
p.17, l9: “a strong and significant skill “ - strong is most likely significant. If you still want to emphasise significance I suggest: strong (statistically significant) skill.
p.17,l17: non-existent
p.19,l7: line of arguments
p.19,l16: remove “but linked”
Conclusions: I suggest mentioning a better representation of cyclone characteristics in HR version (shown in fig.4), not just their frequencies

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RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (03 Oct 2019)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (12 Oct 2019) by Gerrit Lohmann

AR by Mareike Schuster on behalf of the Authors (22 Oct 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (23 Oct 2019) by Gerrit Lohmann

AR by Mareike Schuster on behalf of the Authors (01 Nov 2019)

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Short summary

Decadal climate predictions are valuable to society as they allow us to estimate climate conditions several years in advance. We analyze the latest version of the German MiKlip prediction system (https://www.fona-miklip.de) and assess the effect of the model resolution on the skill of the system. The increase in the resolution of the system reduces the bias and significantly improves the forecast skill for North Atlantic extratropical winter dynamics for lead times of two to five winters.