Quantifying bioalbedo: a new physically based model and discussion of empirical methods for characterising biological influence on ice and snow albedo

Cook, Joseph M.; Hodson, Andrew J.; Gardner, Alex S.; Flanner, Mark; Tedstone, Andrew J.; Williamson, Christopher; Irvine-Fynn, Tristram D. L.; Nilsson, Johan; Bryant, Robert; Tranter, Martyn

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-2611-2017

Articles | Volume 11, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-2611-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-2611-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 11, issue 6

Research article

|

17 Nov 2017

Research article |

| 17 Nov 2017

Quantifying bioalbedo: a new physically based model and discussion of empirical methods for characterising biological influence on ice and snow albedo

Joseph M. Cook, Andrew J. Hodson, Alex S. Gardner, Mark Flanner, Andrew J. Tedstone, Christopher Williamson, Tristram D. L. Irvine-Fynn, Johan Nilsson, Robert Bryant, and Martyn Tranter

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Final revised paper (published on 17 Nov 2017)
Preprint (discussion started on 26 Apr 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

SC1: 'A short comment', Cenlin He, 30 May 2017
- AC1: 'Response to Short Comment', Joseph Cook, 02 Jun 2017
RC1: 'Review of Cook et al. on bioalbedo', Anonymous Referee #1, 11 Jun 2017
- AC2: 'Response to Review', Joseph Cook, 27 Jun 2017
RC2: 'Review, Cook et al., 'Quantifying Bioalbedo'', S. McKenzie Skiles, 28 Jul 2017
- AC3: 'Response to reviewer 2', Joseph Cook, 15 Aug 2017

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Joseph Cook on behalf of the Authors (15 Aug 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (23 Aug 2017) by Marco Tedesco

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (11 Sep 2017) by Marco Tedesco

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (25 Sep 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Cook et al. present a revised version of their manuscript on bioalbedo, following suggestions for improvement from two reviewers.

Reviewer 1 recommended only minor revisions, all of which have been incorporated into the manuscript in a satisfying way.

However, reviewer 2 suggested a major revision of the manuscript, not because of lack of novelty or strength of the paper, but because the review-style character of the paper was deemed unnecessary. Substantial parts of the manuscript could be made more concise by referring to existing literature, rather than reiterating well-established knowledge of radiative transfer theory and good practice in observational techniques.

The authors chose not to take this major point of concern of reviewer 2 into account. As an argument, they put forward that the completeness of the paper benefits the cross-disciplinary audience for this paper. Thereby, they let completeness prevail over concision.

The result is a paper that extends traditional reporting on novel theory and modelling with a textbook-like review of radiative transfer theory and techniques. It is an editorial decision whether this fits the scope of the journal.

As a final remark, I think that the authors overlooked a number of general remarks from reviewer 2, which should be taken into account when preparing the final version of this manuscript. These are mentioned in the paragraph preceding the line-by-line comments. These general remarks pertain to a) other literature by the same first author, b) the difficulty to translate theory to remote sensing practice, and c) the recommendation to replace "impurity" by "particulate" or "constituent".

Two final textual suggestions:
- Like P1L16, replace "significant" in the first sentence of the Conclusions section.
- Change section nos. 8 and 9 to 7 and 8.

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (12 Oct 2017) by Marco Tedesco

AR by Joseph Cook on behalf of the Authors (13 Oct 2017) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

Biological growth darkens snow and ice, causing it to melt faster. This is often referred to as bioalbedo. Quantifying bioalbedo has not been achieved because of difficulties in isolating the biological contribution from the optical properties of ice and snow, and from inorganic impurities in field studies. In this paper, we provide a physical model that enables bioalbedo to be quantified from first principles and we use it to guide future field studies.