Framework for Improving Land Boundary Conditions in Ocean Regional Products

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I am fine with the revision: the authors replied to all previous points (all minor points, indeed). The only remaining recommendation is to specify in the text that the use of SMOS data for validation has the potential problem of low resolution. I think this is never stated and is a potential drawback.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The MS presents results of the study aimed at improving lateral boundary conditions of an ocean model at river deltas and estuaries.  The results are interesting and in principle are worth publication. However the MS is poorly written, contains a number of confusing, incomplete and potentially wrong statements and requires a major revision, mainly in terms of re-wording the text throughout the MS and adding figures.

Specific comments are given below. The list can be extended, so that the authors are advised to re-work the whole MS.

The frequent reference to ‘operational oceanography’ creates a wrong impression that the paper describes an operational modelling system. In reality,  the modelling was only done for past years 2008-2019 and therefore the system is not working in real time. The wording should be corrected.

 The MS is focussed on calculation of boundary conditions at river mouths by combination of estuarine and ocean models. The models have different computational  grids, therefore a figure showing the grids of the neighbouring models ( at least in some sample locations) is required in order to understand the text.

Line 18. ‘Coupling ocean and coastal operational modelling…’ is confusing. Coastal modelling can be related to processes on land such as beach erosion.  A better way to say is to use ‘ Coupling of coastal or regional ocean models’. The authors should be more clear when they use the term ‘coastal’ – is it the coastal ocean or coastal land?

Lines 19-22 ‘ … hydrological models fail to provide accurate results near the coastal area’ – confusing statement. Do you mean ‘… hydrological models fail to provide accurate results at the land-ocean boundary’?

Line 22.’ coastal and ocean models…’ - see comment to Line 18. You probably meant ‘coastal ocean models…’

Line 28. Confusing statement ‘…integrating the freshwater flows into regional mesoscale grids.’ Do you mean ‘…provide boundary conditions to eddy-resolving ( or high-resolution?) ocean models’?

Line 29. ’ MOHID’ –  the abbreviations should be spelt out in full the first time they are used.

Line 37 ‘ … in their neighbouring coastal area’ ->  ‘…in their neighbouring coastal area of the ocean’?

Line 42. ‘…water properties near the coastal area’ Please clarify. Do you mean ’…near the coast’ ?

Line 43. ‘used as land boundaries’ -> ‘used as land boundary conditions’?

Line 44. ‘…river temporal variability…’-> ‘…river discharge temporal variability’ ?

Line 56. ‘…into regional mesoscale grids…’ -> ‘…into regional mesoscale ocean models’ ?

Line 62 ‘LAMBDA’ - –  the abbreviations should be spelt out in full the first time they are used.

Line 56. ‘IBI-MFC’ - the abbreviations should be spelt out in full the first time they are used.

Line 66. ‘…the different between …’ -> ‘…the difference between…’?

Line 67-68 ‘…was evaluated on a regional a western Iberia regional ocean  model’ – Wrong grammar

 Line 109.  ‘Hydrologic models at 1-9 km horizontal scale…’ ‘scale ‘or ‘resolution? Please clarify.

Line 130-131 ‘…combine … boundary conditions with local tidal processes’ How do you combine ‘conditions’ with ‘processes’ ? – rewording is required.

Line 159.’ In the open ocean boundary, the model receives tides’ – Please clarify what do you mean by ‘receives tides’?

Line 199 etc ‘The WestIberia domain covers the area limited by  latitudes …’ A figure is required to show the model domain.

Line 203. ‘…cells approximately 6.7 km tall and 5.2 km wide. ‘ Clarify what do you mean.

Line 206.’ … 43-layer Cartesian domain…’ Do you mean ‘geopotential levels’ ?

Line 214. ‘…inner area the model runs free, without assimilation’ Please clarify for how long the inner model runs without DA.  Probably not for the whole period of 2008-2019.

Line 214-215 ‘…the open ocean boundary  condition does not interfere with the river influenced areas’ . This is unlikely to be possible. If you change the boundary conditions significantly the circulation in the inner area will change.

Line 217 ‘…based in two nested grids’ ->’… based on two nested grids’ ?

Figures 11-13. The colour scales are inadequate, they have  too large  a spread, so that only blue colour is actually seen in Figures. Therefore the spatial structure of the salinity fields is lost.

Figures are of very bad quality and difficult to see what they show.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I find the present work very interesting and worthwhile to be published. However I think it needs to undergo some major revisions to better address some issues that I found during the reading.

Major comments

1) I warmly suggested the Authors to extensively rewrite the abstract to make more clear and immediate the main outcomes of the work

2) please redraw the figures eventually increasing the resolution because they are not very readable

 

Minor comments

line 18-19: I disagree with statement. For example in the Medcordex ensemble ocean models are coupled to hydrological models. See for example:

Sevault et al. 2014 A fully coupled Mediterranean regional climate system model: design and evaluation of the ocean component for the 1980–2012 period, Tellus A

Reale, M., Giorgi, F., Solidoro, C., Di Biagio, V., Di Sante, F., Mariotti, L., et al. (2020). The regional Earth system Model RegCM‐ES: Evaluation of the Mediterranean climate and marine biogeochemistry. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 12, e2019MS001812. https://doi.org/ 10.1029/2019MS001812

Please reformulate 

line 24-28 : Not very clear...please reformulate..

Line 37: remove "neighbouring"

Line 42-43: as I said before I disagree with this statement. please reformulate the sentence eventually discussing the references that I provided before

Line 50 : I would not use "mesoscale"..as you are already using regional

Line 53: do you mean here "freshwater fluxes"?

Paragraph 1.1 : I would move this part in the Material and methods

Line 93: what do you mean with Cartesian? z-level?

line 97: "varying in space and time surface boundary conditions"

line 103: please reformulate

Please increase the resolution of the figures because they are not very readable

Line 183: what do you mean with constant freshwater?

Line 217-28: why do not you use Era5?

With "determination" do you mean correlation?

Line 246: instead of "forecast" I would say "simulate"

Line 265: how?

Line 287: what do you mean with freshwater conditions?

Line 334: ..buoy.However..

 

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The MS has been improved and can be published in its current form

Reviewer 3 Report

I thank the Authors for following my suggestions. I think now the paper is ready for publication. I would like to point out that there are also Med-cordex manuscripts discussing the ocean compartments of the models and salinity . For example : 

Soto-Navarro, J., Jordá, G., Amores, A., Cabos, W., Somot, S., Sevault, F., et al. (2020). Evolution of Mediterranean Sea water properties under climate change scenarios in the Med-CORDEX ensemble. Clim. Dyn. 54, 2135–2165. doi: 10.1007/s00382-019-05105-4