After reviewing the first revision of the manuscript by Guan et al., I am making the following recommendations, summarized as major revisions due to the number and variety of revisions necessary in the text. The first revision is an improvement over the original manuscript, but remains below the standards ACP maintains. I appreciate the thoughtful and thorough response of the authors to the reviewers' comments, and hope that they are able to continue to revise the manuscript to resolve the remaining issues.
Major comments:
(1) It is not clear if the analysis uses monthly-mean data or cold season-mean data. Equation 2 implies that the analysis uses cold season-mean data, but the text sometimes suggests otherwise. The authors should clarify this point in Section 2 and alter their language throughout the remainder of the text. For example, when referring to temperature trends, the authors should use "cold season-mean temperature trends." If the authors did indeed use monthly-mean data, should alter Equation 2 accordingly, and be more specific about what sort of high-pass filter was applied to the data in the course of the dynamical adjustment methodology.
(2) What sort of high pass filter was applied? Were the data merely detrended? Was a running mean removed? Please be specific, otherwise the study will not be strictly reproducible.
(3) Which CMIP5 experiment was used? I presume it was the CMIP5 historical experiment. Although this detail may seem to some to be obvious, I think it would make the text more precise. Furthermore, what were the forcings included in the historical experiments. The authors should investigate model-by-model which forcings were included. Lastly, how many ensemble members were used for each model included in the analysis? 1? If so, which one? These details could be summarized in a sentence or two, and need not take up additional space in a table or text. As it stands these critical details are missing.
Minor comments:
(1) Title: I appreciate the authors revising the title to include cold season, but upon reviewing their new title, I think that the original one is better. See my next comment about adding cold season to the abstract.
(2) Line 39-40: Add "observed" prior to "warming" and strike "observed in previous decades"
(3) Line 41: Add "during the boreal cold season" after "change".
(4) Line 44: Probably do not need to use tenths of a percent. It will suffice to round the contributions to 44 and 56%, respectively.
(5) Line 46: Change "such as" to "represented by". These patterns of variability may not be purely internal, but are being used here to represent internal variability.
(6) Line 55: Add "the so-called" prior to "global warming hiatus". There may be a few readers who are unfamiliar with the term.
(7) Line 75: What are these studies? This sentence implies that there are more than one. However, only one reference follows in the next sentence, Zhang et al. 2013. This statement needs more support from references.
(8) Line 79-80: Over what period did rapid industrialization occur? Can you add a reference here?
(9) Line 81-83: Quite to the contrary, Wallace et al. interpreted the dynamically induced warming as primarily due to internal variability not greenhouse gases. Here the authors make it sound like Wallace et al. claimed that the dynamical changes were caused by greenhouse gases. This is not the case. Needs rewriting.
(10) Line 88: Change "process of" to "warming".
(11) Line 92: Change "changes of atmospheric circulations..." to "changes in atmospheric circulations..."
(12) Line 94: "and so on" appears many times in the paper. This is terribly imprecise language. The reader does not know what "and so on" means. Remove it. Simply end the sentence with "interaction between land and atmosphere, and feedback from snow."
(13) Line 126: Remove the sentence beginning "The wet regions are most distributed..." It adds little new information that cannot be deduced from the previous sentence.
(14) Line 135: Wallace et al. defined the cold season as November to April, not November to March.
(15) Line 141-142, I suggest this sentence be rewritten as follows, "The sea level pressure (SLP) data are standardize and the temperature time series are high pass filtered and standardize prior to carrying out the following dynamical adjustment steps." Next, add a sentence that describes the high pass filter. Then address the DA steps.
(16) Line 144: this clause should read "correlate the grid-point temperature time series with the SLP field to generate a one-point cross correlation map;"
(17) Line 151, after mutually orthogonal, I suggest you add ", taking care to high pass filter each successive residual temperature time series prior to calculating correlation patterns (step 1)."
(18) Line 156, I suggest this sentence be rewritten as follows "The residual part is associated with radiatively forced factors, called the RFT."
(19) Line 159: Remove "and so on."
(20) Line 159: Replace "For" with "In the", then on Line 160, change "is" to "are".
(21) Line 172-174: Rewrite this sentence as "The difference evaluations of DIT and RFT indicate that the DIT and RFT played difference roles in determining the raw temperature variability."
(22) Line 188: Change "is" to "was", also add "during the period 1902-2011"; you have not demonstrated that radiative forcing is always more important than dynamically induced changes.
(23) Line 189: This sentence is confusing and should be rewritten or removed.
(24) Line 192: This sentence expresses a truism. It should be removed. The maps HAVE TO exhibit different locations of high contribution. RAW = DIT + RFT
(25) Line 193: I think you mean "variability" where you say "change" here. It is unclear if you are referring to interannual variability or trends. I believe you are referring to trends.
(26) Line 197-198: This sentence is confusing. It could be rewritten as "Figure 4 illustrates that regional temperature variability is mostly determined by RFT."
(27) Line 200: Add "variability" after "temperature" and "cold season" before "temperature". Remove "in the cold season" after "precipitation".
(28) Line 206: Replace "provides" with "shows".
(29) Line 211: Replace "dominated" with "dominant"
(30) Line 212: Replace "However" with "Conversely"
(31) Line 213: Replace "over different areas" with "as a function of annual mean precipitation". This is more precise in terms of your subject. It gives some detail to how the "different areas" are organized.
(32) Line 216: Replace "leaded by" with "associated with"
(33) Line 217: replace the sentence beginning "It improves" with "This extends understanding of the ESAW (Huang et al., 2012), and suggests that the role of radiative forcing was critical in the process of warming over East Asia."
(34) Line 219: I suggest that part of this sentence be removed. The part about "expressed different variability of DIT and RFT" is confusing. Perhaps the authors could write "These results are not limited to monthly-mean temperatures. Figure 7 shows the distributions of raw..."
(35) Line 229: Replace "is" with "shows" and add "-induced" after "dynamically" and add "-forced" after "radiatively".
(36) Line 231: Replace "had a warming trend" with "was positive"
(37) Line 235: Remove "the area along of"
(38) Line 236: Rewrite as "The RFT trend (Fig. 8c) exhibits an obvious warming over the northern area, with a small cooling over South China. This is similar to the trends in daily minimum temperature, but the areal extent of cooling was much larger than the radiatively forced daily minimum temperature in 7c.
(39) Line 240: Replace the sentence beginning "In order to distinguish the" with "In order to distinguish the contributions to regionally-averaged temperature trends, raw, DIT, and RFT minimum and maximum trends are shown as a function of annual-mean precipitation in Fig. 9 and Fig. 10, respectively."
(40) Line 243: "over different regions" is not only vague, it is not accurate. The daily minimum warming rate is higher than the daily maximum "over all regions".
(41) Line 246: Replace this sentence with "Similar to monthly-mean temperatures, the DIT trend did not show much variation with increasing annual-mean precipitation in both daily minimum and maximum temperatures."
(42) Line 255: Replace "patterns cover" with "correlations over"...replace "with a 95%" with "significant at the 95%"
(43) Line 256: Replace "patterns" with "correlations" and "with a" with "also significant at the"
(44) Line 257: Replace "It suggests the" with "This indicates a"
(45) Line 262: replace "coefficient of AMO index and DIT" with "coefficients between the AMO index and DIT"
(46) Line 264: Replace "opposite with" with "opposite to"
(47) Line 266-277: This entire paragraph needs to be rewritten for clarity and grammar. Please refer to my major comment (3). Furthermore, the last 3 sentences are misleading. The multi-model mean should be smoother than the observed curve, you have averaged much of the internal variability out (even in a historical run). Is the notable consistency you refer to in terms of the smoothed curves or the raw time series?
(48) Line 278-279: Which time series are being correlated? The CMIP5 multi-model ensemble mean and the observed DIT and RFT time series?
(49) Line 283-284: Rewrite the sentence starting "It indicates" as "It indicates the forced temperature changes in CMIP5 have a closer relationship with RFT than DIT." Remove the part "namely, CMIP5 models reflect part of raw temperatures." It is confusing and difficult to understand what you mean.
(50) Line 287: Probably best to include "multi-model" when referring to the ensemble mean.
(51) Line 287: This sentence would read better as "Multi-model ensemble mean temperature trends shown as a function of annual precipitation in Fig. 14 stand in contrast to the regional RFT trends over the drylands shown in Fig. 6.
(52) Line 290: End the stance at "ensemble mean temperature." Then change "which demonstrates" to "In contrast to observations, the CMIP5 simulations exhibit a uniform temperature change over East Asia."
(53) Line 295: Remove "and so on."
(54) Line 295: Revise as "It is more likely related to regional factors not well represented in the models."
(55) Line 297: Change "suggest" to "provide evidence"
(56) Line 300: Again, probably can round these figures to full percentages, 44 and 56%.
(57) Line 300: Add "variability" after "to the SAT"
(58) Line 301: Replace "was on" with "varied on"
(59) Line 303: This sentence is confusing and should be rewritten. What does "took a continuous warming effect over the globe" mean?
(60) Line 310: Change "substantially declining" to "substantial decline"
(61) Line 316: Remove "Besides,"
(62) Line 321: Change "process" to "processes"
(63) Line 322: remove "well" altogether, add "warming hiatus across the entire Northern Hemisphere" after "regional warming and".
(64) Line 331: Replace "But" with "However,"
(65) Line 518: In Figure 3 caption, Move "cold season" prior to "trend". Remove "in the cold season"
(66) Line 521: In Figure 4 caption, rewrite "Spatial distribution of the contribution of dynamically induced (a) and radiatively forced (b) temperature to raw cold-season temperature variability from 1902 to 2011 over East Asia.
(67) Line 541: Add "variability" after "raw temperature"
(68) Figure 13: What are the small purple diamond shapes in the Figure? Are these an artifact of the analysis or something that was not described. Either explain them or remove them. |
- Printer-friendly version
- Supplement
