Bias-correcting carbon fluxes derived from land-surface satellite data for retrospective and near-real-time assimilation systems

Weir, Brad; Ott, Lesley E.; Collatz, George J.; Kawa, Stephan R.; Poulter, Benjamin; Chatterjee, Abhishek; Oda, Tomohiro; Pawson, Steven

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-9609-2021

Articles | Volume 21, issue 12

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-9609-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-9609-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 21, issue 12

Research article

|

28 Jun 2021

Research article |

| 28 Jun 2021

Bias-correcting carbon fluxes derived from land-surface satellite data for retrospective and near-real-time assimilation systems

Brad Weir, Lesley E. Ott, George J. Collatz, Stephan R. Kawa, Benjamin Poulter, Abhishek Chatterjee, Tomohiro Oda, and Steven Pawson

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Final revised paper (published on 28 Jun 2021)
Preprint (discussion started on 06 Aug 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'referee comments', Anonymous Referee #1, 30 Sep 2020
- AC1: 'Response to Reviewer 1', Brad Weir, 17 Nov 2020
RC2: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #2, 16 Oct 2020
- AC2: 'Response to Reviewer 2', Brad Weir, 17 Nov 2020

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Brad Weir on behalf of the Authors (17 Nov 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (18 Nov 2020) by Anita Ganesan

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (04 Dec 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

My comments on the rebuttal are as follows:

Line 442: ‘The authors feel … in our research’
This argument cannot be a justification for publication in ACP.

Line 452: ‘The authors agree … technically appropriate’
I don’t see why ‘bias-correcting’ would suggest a correction that is constant in time. I would rather think of a calibration as being relatively constant in time (for a good measurement device). A calibration is like a bias correction, but then of a measurement device against a commonly accepted standard. I don’t see how it can apply to this case. To which flux standard is being calibrated?

Line 459: ‘The first part … Line 91’
I was not asking for an explanation, since I have read the paper. The comment was about the clarity of the structure in the eyes of an independent reader. From the answer I conclude that the authors chose to ignore my constructive attempt to improve the manuscript.

Line 466: ‘You do understand that correctly … of this paper’
The authors do not get the point that I’m looking for a clearer description here, since I got confused with the current formulations. It needs improvement so that other readers do not need to struggle like me to understand what was done.

Line 500: ‘The purpose … does well, etc’
The point here was that I was missing an explanation of how the land sink was optimized. This sentence suggested that it was going to be explained in a results section, which is not the right place to explain a method.

Line 495: ‘It very well could …’ No, clearly not. There are many other places in the world for which the same holds, so there is no reason to single out the mid-west here.

Line 512: ‘See line 155 … ‘
The problem is still there. Section 3.2. is called ‘the empirical land sink’, whereas it discusses NBE throughout, which is not the empirical land sink.

Line 539: ‘The authors feel … in the paper’
The review is suspicious that this was not shown whereas it could easily have been, because it would raise questions.

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ED: Reconsider after major revisions (08 Dec 2020) by Anita Ganesan

AR by Brad Weir on behalf of the Authors (12 Mar 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (01 Apr 2021) by Anita Ganesan

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (23 Apr 2021)

ED: Publish as is (23 Apr 2021) by Anita Ganesan

AR by Brad Weir on behalf of the Authors (03 May 2021) Manuscript

Short summary

We present a collection of carbon surface fluxes, the Low-order Flux Inversion (LoFI), derived from satellite observations of the Earth's surface and calibrated to match long-term inventories and atmospheric and oceanic records. Simulations using LoFI reproduce background atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements with comparable skill to the leading surface flux products. Available both retrospectively and as a forecast, LoFI enables the study of the carbon cycle as it occurs.