Regional scaling of annual mean precipitation and  water availability with global temperature change

Greve, Peter; Gudmundsson, Lukas; Seneviratne, Sonia I.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-9-227-2018

Articles | Volume 9, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-9-227-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-9-227-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 9, issue 1

Research article

|

13 Mar 2018

Research article |

| 13 Mar 2018

Regional scaling of annual mean precipitation and water availability with global temperature change

Peter Greve, Lukas Gudmundsson, and Sonia I. Seneviratne

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Final revised paper (published on 13 Mar 2018)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 20 Jun 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Interactive comment on “Regional scaling of annual mean precipitation and water availability with global temperature change” by Peter Greve et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 23 Jul 2017
- AC1: 'Initial response to Reviewer 1', Peter Greve, 12 Sep 2017
RC2: 'Comment on "Regional scaling of annual mean precipitation and water availability with global temperature change" by Greve et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 26 Jul 2017
- AC2: 'Initial response to Reviewer 2', Peter Greve, 12 Sep 2017
RC3: 'Comments on "Regional scaling of annual mean precipitation and water availability with global temperature change"', Anonymous Referee #3, 27 Jul 2017
- AC3: 'Initial response to Reviewer 3', Peter Greve, 12 Sep 2017

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (12 Sep 2017) by Christian Franzke

AR by Peter Greve on behalf of the Authors (20 Dec 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (22 Dec 2017) by Christian Franzke

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (03 Jan 2018)

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (09 Feb 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have satisfactorily revised the manuscript in response to the reviewers' comments. Below are a few additional suggestions to ensure clarity of the manuscript.

Throughout the manuscript, the authors refer to supplementary information for additional material. However, I find the general reference to a document with eight figures, leaving it to the reader to find the relevant information themselves, is not particularly helpful. Readability could be much improved by pointing the reader to the specific supplementary figure that is relevant in the context of the respective claims in the main text (e.g. page 4 line 11, page 5 line 34, page 6 line 19, and check throughout the manuscript so that all supplementary figures are referenced in the text).

Page 4 line 12: change “regions” to “grid cells”

Page 4 line 17: Please be clear about what this failing of the tests in hyper-arid regions means for your study, and how do you deal with this in your analysis

Page 4 line 30: change “P (P-E)” to “P and P-E”

Page 5 line 7: delete “at least” (you say “or higher” which means the same)

Page 5 line 18: Please be exact in your language. I do not think that the “scaling coefficient” is a function of T because the coefficient is derived from regression of P values across the entire T range, so should be constant?

Page 5 line 29: same for scaling coefficient of P-E

page 6 line 20: change “P (P-E)” to “P and P-E”

page 6 line 21: change “(Fig. 8)” to “and Figure 8, respectively” or similar

page 6 line 24: please specify “more certain signal for higher emissions”; change “huge” to “large”

page 6 line 29: change “P (P-E)” to “P and P-E”

page 7 line 1: please specify differences IN THE DISTRIBUTION SHAPES, or similar

page 7 line 3: I still don't think Sources of uncertainty is a particular useful heading for section 3.2 given also 3.1 discusses a source of uncertainty. Please consider a more useful structuring or heading, e.g. an alternative heading for 3.2 could be “Comparing different sources of uncertainty”.

Page 7 line 16: I do not follow the discussion that the large uncertainty from model choice should be related to certainty in the scaling response, in fact this seems illogical. Can you please better explain this relation?

Page 7 line 19: Also I do not see how QBO (acting on inter-annual time scales) would affect long-term climate change scaling rates – please explain.

Page 8 line 8: this sentence seems to mix up singular and plural: “difference...is” or “differences...are”?

Page 8 line 11: change “of more” to “by more”

page 8 lines 20 and 21: change “P (P-E)” to “P and P-E”

page 9 line 14: why “naturally” ?

Figure 9: The authors should specify here for which temperature change or for which time scale these contributions of uncertainty sources are valid. For example the role of internal variability would depend on time scale (Rowan and Sutton 2009).

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (09 Feb 2018) by Christian Franzke

AR by Peter Greve on behalf of the Authors (12 Feb 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (13 Feb 2018) by Christian Franzke

AR by Peter Greve on behalf of the Authors (13 Feb 2018)

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Short summary

Assessing projected hydroclimatological changes is crucial, but associated with large uncertainties. We statistically assess here the response of precipitation and water availability to global temperature change, enabling us to estimate the significance of drying/wetting tendencies under anthropogenic climate change. We further show that opting for a 1.5 K warming target just slightly influences the mean response but could substantially reduce the risk of experiencing extreme changes.