Mapping snow depth within a tundra ecosystem using multiscale observations and Bayesian methods

Wainwright, Haruko M.; Liljedahl, Anna K.; Dafflon, Baptiste; Ulrich, Craig; Peterson, John E.; Gusmeroli, Alessio; Hubbard, Susan S.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-857-2017

Articles | Volume 11, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-857-2017

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-857-2017

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

Articles | Volume 11, issue 2

Research article

|

03 Apr 2017

Research article |

| 03 Apr 2017

Mapping snow depth within a tundra ecosystem using multiscale observations and Bayesian methods

Haruko M. Wainwright, Anna K. Liljedahl, Baptiste Dafflon, Craig Ulrich, John E. Peterson, Alessio Gusmeroli, and Susan S. Hubbard

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Final revised paper (published on 03 Apr 2017)
Preprint (discussion started on 30 Aug 2016)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Referee comment', NE Eckert, 01 Oct 2016
- AC1: 'Response to Referee #1 (Dr. Eckert)', Haruko Wainwright, 10 Feb 2017
RC2: 'Review of: TC-20160-168 - Wainwright et al., 2016 – Mapping snow depth within a tundra ecosystem using multiscale observations and Bayesian methods.', Anonymous Referee #2, 16 Nov 2016
- AC2: 'Response to Referee #2', Haruko Wainwright, 10 Feb 2017

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Haruko Wainwright on behalf of the Authors (10 Feb 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (11 Feb 2017) by Guillaume Chambon

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (17 Feb 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Line 189 – Suggest changing to – ‘To further evaluate the accuracy of the airborne DEM, …’
Line 193 – Change – ‘GPS’ to ‘DGPS’
Line 202-203 – The stated horizontal positional accuracy of 0.5m is far less than that reported on the Snow Hydro manufacturer’s webpage. The error associated with these GPS units can vary from day-to-day. Was the value of 0.5m calculated in comparison to the DGPS for this campaign? What is the source for this level of accuracy? Please check all references to this accuracy within the text if it needs to be updated (Line 666).
Line 205 – suggest changing to – ‘measurement was associated with latitude/longitude positional information recorded by the Magnaprobe’s built in GPS receiver’.
Line 208 – suggest changing to – ‘the built-in GPS’ to ‘Magnaprobe GPS’
Line 215-217 – The authors state that along the 500m transects only 8 points were measured along each line - Is this correct?
Line 216 – Change – ‘title’ to ‘tile’
Line 309-310 – I’m not sure that excluding areas of high topographic variability is appropriate here. With the GPR data you did not want to include reflections from near-by terrain that could introduce errors in the GPR measurements. In the case of accurately georeferenced PhoDAR, areas of high topographic variability do not introduce instrument related errors in the snow depth estimates. Agreement between snow depth probe measurements and PhoDAR may be less in these areas, but that is likely due to the complexity of the environment and the lack of representativeness of a single snow depth probe measurement in this area. When presenting the RMSE values of the PhoDAR snow depth product vs the measurements, I think it is important to present both RMSE values for all ice-wedge polygon regions, as well as RMSE values for if you limit the application to less complex terrain (such as presented on Line 506 - Please updated Lines 740).
Line 611 – Suggest changing ‘procedure’ to ‘Bayesian snow depth estimations’
Line 611 – Suggest changing to – ‘The snow depth data not used in the estimations included 100 points randomly selected…’
Lines 640-641 – suggest changing to match with Lines 246-247 – ‘we indeed found some layers of ice created by winter rain events that were not detected by the GPR or with probe measurements, but rather were noted (describe method of how these layers were ‘found’ i.e. while excavating snow pits?)’.
Line 659 – note spelling error
Line 689 – suggest changing – the term “average” to ‘median’ in the following couple of sentences to match the boxplots in figure 5 and the text later on (Lines 694). Also suggest changing ‘Plot’ to ‘Plots’ in Line 689.
Line 1067 – Suggest adding – ‘represents the 183 snow depths…’

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (20 Feb 2017) by Guillaume Chambon

AR by Haruko Wainwright on behalf of the Authors (26 Feb 2017) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

Snow has a profound impact on permafrost and ecosystem functioning in the Arctic tundra. This paper aims to characterize the variability of end-of-winter snow depth and its relationship to topography in ice-wedge polygon tundra of Arctic Alaska. In addition, we develop a Bayesian geostatistical method to integrate multiscale observational platforms (a snow probe, ground penetrating radar, unmanned aerial system and airborne lidar) for estimating snow depth in high resolution over a large area.