A Review of Operational Ensemble Forecasting Efforts in the United States Air Force
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper entitled "A Review of Operational Ensemble Forecasting Efforts in the United States Air Force" by Kuchera et al. provides a nice summary of end-to-end ensemble efforts in the USAF. The paper is generally well written and offers a unique, raw insider perspective of the challenges and benefits associated with implementation and acceptance of ensemble forecasting in operations. Overall, my recommendation is that the paper needs minor revisions to be acceptable for publication; however, I will note that some work is needed with the figures.
Minor Comments
- Number, quality, and configuration of images: While this probably borders on being a major comment, I think some minor effort would lead to large improvements. Clearly, the authors primarily just used previously generated figures (for other purposes and by others in some instances) and stuck them into the paper. Not that all images need to be newly generated just for publication, but it would improve the look, feel, and coherency of the paper. In addition, there are a large number of figures (41). Here are a few suggestions for improving the figures in the paper:
- Merge Figures 3, 4, & 5: into a single multi-panel figure.
- Merge Figures 9 & 10: It's very difficult to tell how well the tornado reports line up with the forecast probabilities in separate figures.
- Merge Figures 13, 14, & 15: Overlay tornado reports on top of SPC tornado outlook, then create a two-panel plot with this newly created figure and Figure 13, so the forecast and outlook/reports could be side-by-side.
- Merge Figures 24-27 into a four-panel figure.
- Merge Figures 38 & 39 into a two-panel figure.
- Line 143: missing ")"
- Line 244: Replace "coagulation" with "collection"
- Lines 248, 515, & 548: Replace "US" with "NOAA"
- Section 5.4 is exceptionally short. It would be good to expand upon the modeling plans (e.g., continue with WRF for the convection-allowing ensemble or moving to the UM?)
Author Response
Thank you for the through review! All suggested changes were incorporated, and additionally we merged a few more figures, basically anything where the figures were to be compared to one another are now merged. This was a very helpful suggestion. There are now 26 figures instead of 41.
Tornado reports were plotted on top of the tornado forecast in 2011, and a verification figure from SPC that had tornado reports on it was used for the tornado forecast in 2012.
Section 5.4 was short intentionally, one lesson we have learned from our own experience and from that of the LaLoux book referenced in the article is that being too specific about future plans is unwise as the world changes rapidly and unpredictably. However, we agreed that it would be good to explain our thoughts on what models we are looking into going forward and we have included information on that.
Reviewer 2 Report
This paper constitutes a very interesting review of NWP forecasting in the USAF in the 21st century, namely the introduction of probabilistic component in the forecasting procedure.
The main objectives are clearly stated, as well as the justification and added value of the paper.
The literature review is extensive and recent.
The data and the methods are clearly explained.
The results are presented and are adequately summarized in the conclusions.
This paper maybe considered for publication in its present form but it seems to be quite large. I would suggest the authors to reduce its size either by grouping some figures in a matrix-like format or/and minimize the case studies presented.
Author Response
Thank you for your review! We grouped a substantial number of figures and the total number is now 26 instead of 41 in the initial draft. We would like to keep the number of case studies presented to show the reader the breadth of applications that these capabilities support.
Reviewer 3 Report
Reviewers' comments:
Most of contents for operative ensemble forecasting in USAF expressed by authors are about GEPS and MEPS. In the meantime, they should add more published papers about GEPS and MEPS in Introduction, and explain or discuss others. Finally, the authors also have to modify and modify and unify in the same abbreviated terms for readers.
END
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Thank you for your review! Because this was written to cover material that was continuously developed over time, we chose to include the GEPS/MEPS references in the sections covering the time periods when the work was done instead of in the introduction. We think this allows the development story to be told and gives the reader the relevant references at the same time. Due to the length of the paper, we chose to refer the reader to the references at times and not explain the concepts in depth.
