Winds and temperatures of the Arctic middle atmosphere during January measured by Doppler lidar

Hildebrand, Jens; Baumgarten, Gerd; Fiedler, Jens; Lübken, Franz-Josef

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-13345-2017

Articles | Volume 17, issue 21

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-13345-2017

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-13345-2017

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

Articles | Volume 17, issue 21

Research article

|

10 Nov 2017

Research article |

| 10 Nov 2017

Winds and temperatures of the Arctic middle atmosphere during January measured by Doppler lidar

Jens Hildebrand, Gerd Baumgarten, Jens Fiedler, and Franz-Josef Lübken

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Final revised paper (published on 10 Nov 2017)
Preprint (discussion started on 20 Mar 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: ''Review'', Anonymous Referee #2, 23 Mar 2017
- SC1: 'scientific significance', Andreas Dörnbrack, 13 May 2017
  - AC2: 'reply to SC1', Jens Hildebrand, 26 Jun 2017
- AC1: 'reply to RC1', Jens Hildebrand, 26 Jun 2017
RC2: 'Review of „Winds and temperature of the Arctic middle atmosphere during January measured by Doppler lidar“ by Hildebrand at al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 26 Apr 2017
- AC3: 'reply to RC2', Jens Hildebrand, 26 Jun 2017

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Jens Hildebrand on behalf of the Authors (26 Jun 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (29 Jun 2017) by Matthias Tesche

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (11 Jul 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

While the authors properly adressed my minor comments, it seems to me that they ignored some of the major comments. See a short list below:

In my major comment #1 I asked the authors to formulate a clear scientific question of their paper. As far as I am concerned, this was neither done, nor did the authors argument against my case. It seems to me as if the authors mostly ignored my comment. Furthermore, to me a mere quantification of a variability without a scientific conclusion does not make a full scientific paper. This is a technical note, which could be published for example in a journal such as "Annales Geophysicae" which encourages such formats.

In reply to my major comment #3, the authors reformulated that their derived $2 \pi \omega^{-1}$ is not the intrinsic frequency. If this is not the case, why not name it differently? By naming it $2 \pi \omega^{-1}$ you imply that it is a frequency and most of the readers will believe it to be such. In fact in the caption of their Figure 6 the authors also name it as "the intrinsic period $(2 \pi \omega^{-1})$ a monochromat gravity wave with the given kinetic-to-potential GWED ratio would have".

In my major comment #6, I asked the authors to thoroughly investigate the effect of switching from one ECMWF run to another around 00 UTC. The authors replied to this with "we do not think that by using data of two different ECMWF runs per night the results might be corrupted". This is not a thorough investigation! At least some proof to back the authors statement is necessary here. As it is right now, it is mere speculation.
Furhermore the authors state concerning their methodology that "Probably all of these methods have their advantages and drawbacks, and it is simply not possible to take all of them into account in every study about gravity waves." While I agree with this statement, I still do not understand why the authors then hold on to a method for which it has been shown (Ehard et al., 2015) that it should not be used! The authors even state that "the approach applied in this study was the only one of the three approaches tested that allowed to quantify the underestimation of GWED in ECMWF data". If the nightly-mean method is the only method which yields this result, but it is known that it has major drawbacks, it makes me very suspicious, that what the authors show here is a mere artifact of their methodology.

Because these issues have not been adressed since the first submission of this paper, I recommend to reject the study in its current form.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (01 Aug 2017)

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (15 Aug 2017) by Matthias Tesche

AR by Jens Hildebrand on behalf of the Authors (22 Sep 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (25 Sep 2017) by Matthias Tesche

AR by Jens Hildebrand on behalf of the Authors (02 Oct 2017)

Short summary

We present altitude profiles of winds and temperatures in the Arctic strato- and mesosphere obtained during three Januaries. The data show large year-to-year variations. We compare the observations to model data. For monthly mean profiles we find good agreement below 55 km altitude but also differences of up to 20 K and 20 m s^-1 above. The fluctuations during single nights indicate gravity waves. The kinetic energy of such waves is typically 5 to 10 times larger than their potential energy.