Evaluation of snow depth and snow cover over the Tibetan Plateau in global reanalyses using in situ and satellite remote sensing observations

Orsolini, Yvan; Wegmann, Martin; Dutra, Emanuel; Liu, Boqi; Balsamo, Gianpaolo; Yang, Kun; de Rosnay, Patricia; Zhu, Congwen; Wang, Wenli; Senan, Retish; Arduini, Gabriele

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-2221-2019

Articles | Volume 13, issue 8

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-2221-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-2221-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 8

Research article

|

27 Aug 2019

Research article |

| 27 Aug 2019

Evaluation of snow depth and snow cover over the Tibetan Plateau in global reanalyses using in situ and satellite remote sensing observations

Yvan Orsolini, Martin Wegmann, Emanuel Dutra, Boqi Liu, Gianpaolo Balsamo, Kun Yang, Patricia de Rosnay, Congwen Zhu, Wenli Wang, Retish Senan, and Gabriele Arduini

Download

Final revised paper (published on 27 Aug 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 19 Mar 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of "Evaluation of snow depth and snow-cover over the Tibetan Plateau in global reanalyses using in-situ and satellite remote sensing observations"', Anonymous Referee #1, 08 Apr 2019
- AC1: 'Response to reviewers', Yvan Orsolini, 12 Jun 2019
RC2: 'A clear paper, to the point', Anonymous Referee #2, 12 Apr 2019
- AC1: 'Response to reviewers', Yvan Orsolini, 12 Jun 2019

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (13 Jun 2019) by Ross Brown

AR by Yvan Orsolini on behalf of the Authors (17 Jun 2019)

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (26 Jun 2019) by Ross Brown

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (01 Jul 2019)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (08 Jul 2019)

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (08 Jul 2019) by Ross Brown

Dear authors, both reviewers are satisfied with your response to their comments (see below) and have recommended acceptance subject to some minor technical issues related to Figure 8 (Reviewer 2) and an editorial comment (Reviewer 1). Congratulations and thank you for choosing The Cryosphere to publish your research.

Best regards, Ross Brown (ed.)

Review 1: I think this paper is overall well-conducted and summarized, and with the suggested revisions being addressed, this paper now has better quality figures and clearer sentences. The sensitivity tests to understand the snow bias problem over the TP is especially interesting, and the problem about blowing snow sublimation parameterizations are now addressed (with experiments) and discussed (e.g., snowfall problem is important for future studies as follow up). I do not have further major comments for now and I believe paper can be published after some editorial revisions. Considering add “which needs to be studied in the future” after P11L12.

Reviewer 2: The authors discovered a bug in one of their sensitivity tests and consequently re- run this test. The results have shown that the initial partial conclusions drawn from this sensitivity test were wrong. These are things that happen. It is unfortunate that the bug occurred in the first place, and fortunate that it was discovered following the enquiry of the other reviewer.
The main conclusions of the manuscript did not change dramatically by this revision. The revised analysis points more strongly to model resolution as a key issue for reducing the precipitation bias over the TP. This makes sense and is in line with previous analyses. The paper is still worthy of publication, the analysis is clean and logical, and the authors have addressed the few comments I had made on the first version of the manuscript. The new figure 8 is a bit hard to read, and it is quite low resolution. It would be nice to have a higher-quality figure for these results.

Hide

AR by Yvan Orsolini on behalf of the Authors (24 Jul 2019) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

The Tibetan Plateau region exerts a considerable influence on regional climate, yet the snowpack over that region is poorly represented in both climate and forecast models due a large precipitation and snowfall bias. We evaluate the snowpack in state-of-the-art atmospheric reanalyses against in situ observations and satellite remote sensing products. Improved snow initialisation through better use of snow observations in reanalyses may improve medium-range to seasonal weather forecasts.