Measurements of precipitation in Dumont d'Urville, Adélie Land, East Antarctica

Grazioli, Jacopo; Genthon, Christophe; Boudevillain, Brice; Duran-Alarcon, Claudio; Del Guasta, Massimo; Madeleine, Jean-Baptiste; Berne, Alexis

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-1797-2017

Articles | Volume 11, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-1797-2017

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-1797-2017

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

Articles | Volume 11, issue 4

Research article

|

04 Aug 2017

Research article |

| 04 Aug 2017

Measurements of precipitation in Dumont d'Urville, Adélie Land, East Antarctica

Jacopo Grazioli, Christophe Genthon, Brice Boudevillain, Claudio Duran-Alarcon, Massimo Del Guasta, Jean-Baptiste Madeleine, and Alexis Berne

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Final revised paper (published on 04 Aug 2017)
Preprint (discussion started on 23 Feb 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Review Grazioli et al., tc-2017-18', Anonymous Referee #1, 20 Mar 2017
- AC1: 'Final response', Jacopo Grazioli, 19 May 2017
RC2: 'Review Grazioli et al', Anonymous Referee #2, 16 Apr 2017
- AC2: 'Final response', Jacopo Grazioli, 19 May 2017

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Jacopo Grazioli on behalf of the Authors (21 May 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (05 Jun 2017) by Michiel van den Broeke

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (09 Jun 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I would like to thank the authors for addressing all my comments and carefully answering my questions. I have only a few minor comments and some suggestions what could be pointed out more clearly which is in my opinion an important outcome of the study but I leave it to the authors to decide what they want to include.

Abstract, L.4-5: It might be a question from which community you are coming from but in my understanding “measurements” are from an observing instrument. I can’t see how measurements can be based on “numerical weather models”. I assume that you want to express, that you show here direct observations and not a reanalysis product. But even a reanalysis uses a data assimilation scheme (often from some numerical weather prediction model) to “interpolate” observations on a model grid but does not provide “measurements” by itself. I suggest to rephrase this sentence or to leave it out completely. In fact, a satellite person could say that CloudSat already provided precipitation measurements for this region which are not based on “numerical weather models” as well.

Abstract, L.13-14 and Fig. 9: If our final goal as observationalists is to help modelers to improve their models, I think it would be worth to clearly point out what the biggest problems in terms of precipitation estimates by the models seem to be in that region. Your Fig. 9 illustrates that nicely: Even the reanalysis is underestimating the intense snowfall events which seem to be very important for the total amount of accumulated snow. This is in agreement with the findings in the papers by Gorodetskaya et al. If the models would be fixed in a way that they don’t produce that unrealistic frequent low intensity snowfall, their underestimation of total snow accumulation would be even worse. I would like to see these aspects more highlighted in the abstract and in the conclusions because I think they are very relevant. It also plays a role for satellite climatologies: If your satellite isn’t able to capture the intense snowfall events (e.g. because of infrequent overflies) the derived precip. climatology is very likely biases (underestimates snowfall amount). You could highlight the importance of the different snowfall intensities to the total accumulation (model vs. obs.) by plotting the cumulated total as function of snowfall rate (=snow accum./6h) similar to Fig. 3, right panel in Kulie and Bennartz, JAMC, 2009, ‘Utilizing Spaceborne Radars to Retrieve Dry Snowfall’.

Typos:
P.2, L. 11: “reanalysis of”, probably better “reanalysis using” or “reanalysis based on”
P.17, L.11: In-text citation instead of (Palm et al.)
P.21, L.8: “We thanks”
P.21m L.14: “poof reading”

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (09 Jun 2017) by Michiel van den Broeke

AR by Jacopo Grazioli on behalf of the Authors (15 Jun 2017) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

We present medium and long-term measurements of precipitation in a coastal region of Antarctica. These measurements are among the first of their kind on the Antarctic continent and combine remote sensing with in situ observations. The benefits of this synergy are demonstrated and the lessons learned from this measurements, which are still ongoing, are very important for the creation of similar observatories elsewhere on the continent.