Towards Improved Quality Control of In Situ Sea Surface Temperatures from Drifting and Moored Buoys in the NOAA iQuam System

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I have no comments to add on the submitted manuscript. It is well written, sound, thorougly documented, easy to read but rigorous in its approach and structure.

Author Response

We thank the Reviewer 1 for the positive review of our paper

Reviewer 2 Report

Table 1: replace FNMOS with FNMOC

Figure 6: Ts is used instead of Tsat

line 248: replace "start cooling down" with "start decreasing"

line 251: what is condition (1) ?

line 269: replace "Figures 8b and 8c" with "Figures 7b and 7c"

line 273 and 276 and 399: replace "cools down" with "decreases"

line 318: replace eta with gamma

Figure 9: replace eta with gamma in caption

lines 333-334: replace figure 8 by figure 7

lines 376-381: this section is misplaced

Figure 15: replace (2) by (b) in caption

Reference numbers are missing in the reference section.

Note that usually, it is better to use dot symbols for plotting data measurements, and to keep lines for plotting models or functions.

Author Response

We thank the Reviewer 2 for thorough comments and finding misprints in our paper. Our responses below are given in italic. The numbers of lines in parentheses correspond to the corrected version of the paper with accepted changes.

Table 1: replace FNMOS with FNMOC     

• Note that Table 1 has been moved to the end of the paper as ‘Abbreviations’ according to the comment of the Reviewer 3.

Figure 6: Ts is used instead of Tsat           

• Corrected

line 248: replace "start cooling down" with "start decreasing"     

• Replaced (now Line 246)

line 251: what is condition (1) ?

• The mentioning of condition (1) was excluded (now Lines 248-249)

line 269: replace "Figures 8b and 8c" with "Figures 7b and 7c"      

• Replaced (now Line 266)

line 273 and 276 and 399: replace "cools down" with "decreases"   

• Replaced with “decreases” in Lines 270 and 273; in Line 388, “difference T_NIGHT - T_L4 cools down” replaced with “negative difference T_NIGHT - T_L4 increases”

line 318: replace eta with gamma                     

• Replaced (now Line 308)

Figure 9: replace eta with gamma in caption    

• Replaced (now Figure 8)

lines 333-334: replace figure 8 by figure 7      

• Replaced (now Lines 319 and 320)

lines 376-381: this section is misplaced         

• The numbers of all sections and subsections have been revisited and corrected

Figure 15: replace (2) by (b) in caption         

• Replaced (now Figure 14)

Reference numbers are missing in the reference section.        

• The numbers have been added to the references

 

Reviewer 3 Report

Manuscript ID: applsci-2550573. Title: Towards Improved Quality Control of in situ SSTs from drifting and moored buoys in the NOAA iQuam system.

Comments:

1. Please avoid using acronyms in the title.

2. The keyword "validation" is very general. This word is not appropriate.

3. In the abstract what does Cal/val mean? Please specify.

4. The first time an abbreviation is presented in the article, its full name must be included. 

5. Table 1, list of abbreviations, should be at the end of the article. In the introduction this table is not adequate.

6. All tables and figures must be previously mentioned in the text. For example, check Figure 2. Please check the entire article.

7. Please include a detailed explanation regarding the validation methods used in this study. This in the materials and methods chapter. 

8. The materials and methods chapter of this article is not clearly visible. This is the main point to be improved in the article.

9. This article has too many figures. Please make good use of the supplementary material.

10. This article should include a chapter discussing the results. Independently.

11. This article should include a separate chapter to present the most relevant conclusions of this study.

Author Response

We appreciate the comments and remarks of the Reviewer 3. Our responses on the comments are given below in italic. The lines’ numbers correspond to the revised version of the paper with changes accepted.

1. Please avoid using acronyms in the title.

• “SST” was replaced in the title with “sea surface temperature”. The acronym “iQuam” was retained because it is the official name of the online system

2. The keyword "validation" is very general. This word is not appropriate.

• The key word “Validation” have been excluded.

3. In the abstract what does Cal/val mean? Please specify.

• “Cal/Val” in the abstract was replaced with “training SST algorithms and validation”

4. The first time an abbreviation is presented in the article, its full name must be included.

-     Corrected (now lines 136-137)

5. Table 1, list of abbreviations, should be at the end of the article. In the introduction this table is not adequate.

            - The list of abbreviations has been moved to the end of the article

6. All tables and figures must be previously mentioned in the text. For example, check Figure 2. Please check the entire article.

- Done. All figures and tables have been placed after their mentionings in the text.

7. Please include a detailed explanation regarding the validation methods used in this study. This in the materials and methods chapter. 

- Section 2 provides detailed description of in situ, analysis and satellite data used in the article. In Section 3, the method of in situ QC is developed. The validation methods are described in details in Section 4, “Validation”. We believe that such order of material presentation provides detailed explanation of the materials and methods.

8. The materials and methods chapter of this article is not clearly visible. This is the main point to be improved in the article.

- Please see the comment to Item 7.

9. This article has too many figures. Please make good use of the supplementary material.

- Figure 8 was excluded from the paper. Now the article includes 15 figures, which is normal for a scientific paper. For example, in our list of references, 10 papers include 15 or more figures.

10. This article should include a chapter discussing the results. Independently.

- The results are discussed in Section 5, “Summary and future work”

11. This article should include a separate chapter to present the most relevant conclusions of this study.

- Separation of results and conclusions into independent sections is not commonly used and is not always optimal. For example, 26 papers out of 42 items in our reference list do not use such separation. We prefer to keep the current structure of the paper.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Manuscript ID: applsci-2550573. Title: Towards Improved Quality Control of in situ SSTs from drifting and moored buoys in the NOAA iQuam system.

Comments:

9. This article has too many figures. Please make good use of the supplementary material.

10. This article should include a chapter discussing the results. Independently.

11. This article should include a separate chapter to present the most relevant conclusions of this study.
12. In this new version, most of the comments made were addressed. However, there are still some unresolved comments. Thank you. 

Author Response

Dear Editors,

The paper has been revised according to the Reviewer 3 comments.

Reviewer 3 made three recommendations:

1. Have a separate Results section – this request is satisfied
2. Have a Conclusion section – this request is also satisfied
3. Reduce number of Figures (currently, 15). We disagree with this request. First, all these Figures are needed to support analyses. Second, the Applied Sciences journal does not explicitly caps the number of figures. Three, at least 2 papers in the same special issue to which our paper is considered, have 16 and 17 Figures, respectively.

All prior edits have been accepted, and new Rond-2 edits made on the top of this clean version. The whole paper has been double-checked again, and remaining typos corrected.

Below are our responses to the Reviewer 3.

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Sincerely,

Alexander Ignatov

 

Responses to Reviewers of Manuscript ID: applsci-2550573 “Towards Improved Quality Control of in situ Sea Surface Temperature from drifting and moored buoys in the NOAA iQuam system” by Boris Petrenko, Alexander Ignatov, Victor Pryamitsyn, and Olafur Jonasson

 

We appreciate this Reviewer’s 3 Round 2 feedback. Below are our responses

9. This article has too many figures. Please make good use of the supplementary material.

-   The article has 15 figures. We are not aware of any restrictions the Applied Sciences journal imposes on the number of Figures in a manuscript. We compared it to other papers published in the same special issue. For instance, https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/13/10/6122 has 17 Figures, and https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/14/6627 has 16. We believe that it is OK.

10. This article should include a chapter discussing the results. Independently.

-    To address this Reviewer’s concern, Section 4 was renamed Results.

11. This article should include a separate chapter to present the most relevant conclusions of this study.

-   To address this Reviewer’s concern, Section 5 is now renamed Conclusion.