Evaluation of Three Reanalysis Soil Temperature Datasets with Observation Data over China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments on “Evaluation of three reanalysis soil temperature datasets with observation data over China” by Zhao et al.

This study utilizes the in-situ meteorological observations over China to evaluate three reanalysis products on the simulation of soil temperature, and investigates the relationship between model biases and land cover categories. I would like to recommend a major revision with the specific comments below:

Specific comments:

1. The scientific issue is not clear. So far, model evaluation studies have been conducted by many researchers, the scientific issues that still need to be addressed should be summarized in the introduction section.

2. Apart from year 2017, I suggest the authors can choose more sample years to do the evaluation. Only in this way can we know the true biases of different reanalysis.

3. One important part of this study is to investigates the relationship between model biases and land cover categories. This is not appropriate because land surface data are generally assimilated in reanalysis product, the quality is high where observations are available and abundant. For example, data quality on shrub land in western China and eastern China could be very different because observations are different. To address this issue, a suggestion is that the authors can evaluate their results in different region and different land cover simultaneously.

4. Different reanalysis has different soil depth, if they are different to soil depth of observations, interpolation may not be a reasonable method. Please clarify how to address this issue.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The evaluation of three reanalysis soil temperature datasets with observation data over China by Zhao et al. is an interesting manuscript. The authored compared soil temperature datasets. The manuscript is not well written and justification to conduct this investigation (reanalysis) is not provided. The discussion part (section) is missing, and the conclusion section is not written well. I found the repetition of various statements across the manuscript. Considering the above facts, I tend to encourage the authors to rewrite their manuscript and submit it.

I would like to see followings in the re-submitted manuscript: 

What is the central question?

What hypotheses are being tested?

The results part have been succinctly written

Discussion?

What are your recommendations?

 

Good luck with the resubmission.

 

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I have read the present work with interest.

I found the topic and the discussion made interesting, however, few points require a revision:

1-The methodology used, e.g. statistical analysis and computational software are not clear enough, even missed. I think it will be advantageous to include an Abstract showing these steps. Especially, in literature, different accurate methodologies have been used to address these problems. It is important to mention this point. I will mention some of these: Chaos 31, 033110 (2021); J. Thermal Stresses 45, 303-318 (2022); Theor. Appl. Climatol. 137, 1811-1824 (2019); Acta Mech 233, 2107–2122 (2022).

2-I think the temperature effects require more discussion especially after tables 9 and 11. Its correlation with geographical positions is not clear enough.

3-Any confrontation with Clim Dyn 50, 317–337 (2018).

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Authors have addressed all my concerns. No new comments.

Author Response

Thanks to the reviewers for their review of the article, it has been revised according to reviewers' comments.  The language has been improved.