Wind tunnel experiments: cold-air pooling and atmospheric decoupling above a melting snow patch

Mott, Rebecca; Paterna, Enrico; Horender, Stefan; Crivelli, Philip; Lehning, Michael

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-10-445-2016

Articles | Volume 10, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-10-445-2016

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-10-445-2016

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

Articles | Volume 10, issue 1

Research article

|

29 Feb 2016

Research article |

| 29 Feb 2016

Wind tunnel experiments: cold-air pooling and atmospheric decoupling above a melting snow patch

Rebecca Mott, Enrico Paterna, Stefan Horender, Philip Crivelli, and Michael Lehning

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Final revised paper (published on 29 Feb 2016)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 08 Oct 2015)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC C2180: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #1, 08 Nov 2015
RC C2187: 'Review of Mott et al.', Richard L.H. Essery, 08 Nov 2015
AC C2678: 'Final response: Reviewer 1', Rebecca Mott, 07 Jan 2016
AC C2697: 'Final response: Reviewer 2 (Richard Essery)', Rebecca Mott, 07 Jan 2016

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Rebecca Mott on behalf of the Authors (11 Jan 2016) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (20 Jan 2016) by Michiel van den Broeke

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (28 Jan 2016)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Review of the revised manuscript tc-2015-138

Wind tunnel experiments: Cold-air pooling and atmospheric decoupling above a melting snow patch

by R. Mott, E. Paterna, S. Horender, P. Crivelli, and M. Lehning

Summary:
I thank the authors for their thorough response to the raised concerns. Overall I am pleased with these responses. However, in general I think the paper can be further improved when more of these aspects that are discussed in the review phase, are also included in the paper. In that way the readers of the paper will be directly confronted with the deeper thoughts, insights and analyses achieved in the response to the reviewer comments (since they are really good!). Also, including these aspects does not necessarily need a lot of time.

Recommendation: Minor revisions

Remarks:
-Please refer to the supplementary material in the manuscript, and include a remark about the uncertainty analysis of the measurements in the main text. Your additional effort made during the revision of the paper is currently not clearly visible for the readers.

-Concerning repeating the experiments: I am not sure that I understand why these experiments cannot be repeated; spring and autumn take three months each. Of course I understand that these measurements are rather challenging, and repeating the experiments would cost time and effort. However, in my opinion it not clear for the reader that the current study was based on a single experiment. Therefore I request that this will be explicitly mentioned in the paper, just for the reader’s clarity. In addition, the three bullets point that indicate the limitations of repeating the experiments should appear in the (discussion section of) main manuscript.

-In addition, the description of the experimental set up can be clarified by a few additional sentences that indicate that you used natural snow. This makes the study more unique and representative for outdoor conditions, and I think this aspect deserves to be advocated more explicitly. It also may help you to explain that repeating hundreds of experiments with natural snow is impossible (because that is what you meant, isn’t it?).

Editorial remarks:
-General: units should be typeset as non-italic, and variables should be italic. Please crosscheck this in the manuscript since it is not yet consistent everywhere
-Hyphenation: also please crosscheck the hyphenation in words like “boundary-layer meteorology”, “boundary-layer flow” etc.

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RR by Richard L.H. Essery (31 Jan 2016)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (Editor review) (02 Feb 2016) by Michiel van den Broeke

AR by Rebecca Mott on behalf of the Authors (08 Feb 2016) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (08 Feb 2016) by Michiel van den Broeke

AR by Rebecca Mott on behalf of the Authors (09 Feb 2016)

Short summary

For the first time, this contribution investigates atmospheric decoupling above melting snow in a wind tunnel study. High-resolution vertical profiles of sensible heat fluxes are measured directly over the melting snow patch. The study shows that atmospheric decoupling is strongly increased in topographic sheltering but only for low wind velocities. Then turbulent mixing close to the surface is strongly suppressed, facilitating the formation of cold-air pooling in local depressions.