Bias correction of surface downwelling longwave and shortwave radiation for the EWEMBI dataset

Lange, Stefan

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-9-627-2018

Articles | Volume 9, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-9-627-2018

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-9-627-2018

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

Articles | Volume 9, issue 2

Research article

|

24 May 2018

Research article |

| 24 May 2018

Bias correction of surface downwelling longwave and shortwave radiation for the EWEMBI dataset

Stefan Lange

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Final revised paper (published on 24 May 2018)
Preprint (discussion started on 25 Sep 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 “Bias correction of surface downwelling longwave and shortwave radiation for the EWEMBI dataset” by Stefan Lange', Anonymous Referee #1, 01 Nov 2017
- AC1: 'Responses by the author to comments by anonymous referee #1', Stefan Lange, 26 Dec 2017
RC2: 'Bias correction of surface downwelling longwave and shortwave radiation for the EWEMBI dataset', Anonymous Referee #2, 02 Nov 2017
- AC2: 'Responses by the author to comments by anonymous referee #2', Stefan Lange, 26 Dec 2017

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (08 Feb 2018) by Valerio Lucarini

AR by Stefan Lange on behalf of the Authors (22 Mar 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (03 Apr 2018) by Valerio Lucarini

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (14 Apr 2018)

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (26 Apr 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The author has gone through a drastic revision of the Results section, and this has deeply improved
the quality of text and figures, whose clarity was my main concern. Particularly, I appreciated that
the author decided to drop the section on the validation with BSRN datasets, which was a relevant
source of confusion and prevented the reader from focusing on the main points remarked in the
work.
As for the text, I want to remark that the subdivision of section 4, emphasizing the differences
among the categories of bias correction methods previously introduced, is a turning point for the
improved clarity of the text.
As for the figures and tables, I appreciate that most of my comments were taken into consideration.
I think that the new notation in Table 1 is more appropriate than the previous one, although less
compact, in some respects. Figure 5 and Figure 6 clearly benefit from the choice of aggregating
months according to seasons.
Finally, I appreciate that the author decided to give a brief description of the quantile mapping tool
in Appendix A. This provides a useful reference for future literature on the topic.
For these reasons, I recommend the manuscript for publication, after a few minor revisions and
technical corrections are considered, as listed below.

MINOR COMMENTS

Figure 1 (previous Figure 2): although the figure has definitely benefited from removing the blue
and red dashed lines, I think some slight improvement could still be helpful. It is clear that the
seasonality of rsds is much stronger than rlds, given the gridpoint chosen as an example (i.e. beyond
the Arctic circle). But is this what the author wants to show here? I wonder whether it would be
possible to display rlds and rsds on different axes, otherwise lines in panels a) and b) are still
difficult to distinguish.
l.9-10, p.8: the paragraph has been expanded, describing when and where the common factor has to
be applied, but I still think an explanation on how it is chosen, even if maybe trivial, is missing.
Figure 5 and 6: as mentioned before, aggregating the months has certainly improved readability.
The smaller y-axis range is also helpful in this respect. Though, some whiskers are hidden beyond
the 0 of the y-axis. It would be better, probably, to extend the range slightly towards positive values,
at least to encompass all the green and blue boxes.

TECHNICAL COMMENTS

Table 1: the subscript “j31d” is not defined.
l.10, p. 17: RMSD probably deserves a definition, even though trivial.

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (03 May 2018) by Valerio Lucarini

AR by Stefan Lange on behalf of the Authors (05 May 2018) Manuscript

Short summary

The bias correction of surface downwelling longwave and shortwave radiation using parametric quantile mapping methods is shown to be more effective (i) at the daily than at the monthly timescale, (ii) if the spatial resolution gap between the reference data and the data to be corrected is bridged in a more suitable manner than by bilinear interpolation, and (iii) if physical upper limits are taken into account during the adjustment of either radiation component.