Statistical Connections between Large-Scale Climate Indices and Observed Mean and Extreme Temperatures in the US from 1948 to 2018
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Line 76: The statement “As climate change in the form of an increase in carbon emissions …” is not strictly correct. Climate change expresses in modification of mean air temperature (the global warming) as well of other climate variables as precipitation, air moisture, frequency of weather and climate extremes.
Lines 88-89: The author wrote: “The specific mechanism by which ENSO affects the US climate is through the generation of Rossby waves in the western subtropical North Pacific “, also is not correct. The large scale atmospheric Rossby waves always are present in the atmosphere and are generated by other processes: dynamic instability of the polar jet stream, influence of the Earth’s rotation, or Coriolis effect). ENSO does not generate Rossby waves! The El Niño (La Niña) phases induce specific configurations in the Rossby waves, affecting their latitudinal amplitude and locating the phases of the trough in the way in which it organices a more direct (less direct) transport of heat from the tropics to middle and high latitudes. The Rossby waves move zonally (eastward or westward, depending of their scale), they does not move northward.
Lines 200-201: The author states that “…the study consists in two parts. The first part attempts to link ……”, however, in whole the paragraph there is not mention about the second part.
Line 260: In the formula (1) what W is? The explanation before and after the formula does not mention W, it may be SW?
Line 604 and Line 609: It is written “The authors..”, but at the beginning of the manuscript only an author is declared
Author Response
Please see the attached response to Reviewer 1.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
See attachment.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
I have found some redaction errors. Please check the text once more. See more in general comments.
Author Response
Please see the attached response to Reviewer 2.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The current paper investigates the correlation of US temperature with a lot of climate indices. Overall, the presentation is very good, and scientific content is mostly reasonable. I have two major concerns listed as folllows. This work can be accepted if these two concerns are not applicable or well addressed by the authors.
1) Has the trend been removed before analysis? Under global warming, the trends of temperature and temperature-related variables can largely bias the correlation.
2) Has the annual cycle of variables been removed before analysis? Over extratropical regions, the annual cycle or two variables can produce significant but trivial correlation.
Author Response
Please see the attached response to Reviewer 3.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
The paper "Assessing potential links between climate variability and mean and extreme surface temperatures throughout the United States" by Jason Giovannettone presents the analysis of links between global climate patterns and long-term monthly mean, minimum, and maximum temperatures measured at sites throughout the contiguous US during the period 1948 to 2018. The Pearson’s correlation coefficient is used to assess correlation strength, while Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation and a bootstrapping technique (p-value) are used to assess the significance of each correlation. It has been found that the Western Hemisphere Warm Pool (WHWP) and El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) exhibited the strongest links to temperatures in the western US, tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures to temperatures in the central US, the WHWP to temperatures throughout much of the eastern US, and atmospheric patterns over the northern Atlantic to temperatures in the Northeast and Southeast.
The subject of the paper is interesting and the methods which are used to examine potential links between several climate indices and long-term average mean, minimum, and maximum surface temperatures are correct and adequate. The paper is well structured.
I suggest for this paper to be accepted for publication in "Earth" after some listed comments and suggestions are taken into account.
Specific comments:
li. 182 "[31]. Volkov et al. [32]" should be "[30]. Volkov et al. [31]"
Check the references from [31] to the end
For example: li. 227 "[22]" should be "[38]", li. 243 "Giovannettone [33]" should be "Giovannettone [32]" etc
li. 260 Define "W" or it is "SW"
Fig. 6. What (c) represents? Li. 542 Add "(c)" before "sea level"
li. 595 "weather parameters" should be "weather variables"
Author Response
Please see the attached response to Reviewer 4.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper is almost ready to publication, I report here only one minor issue. The last sentence of Discussion (Finally, the relativley....) is too long, and different things are put together there. I suggest rewording this part with 2 sentences:
The relatively small sample sizes resulting from the use of large sliding window sizes may also have contributed to the found high correlations, although any bias for this reason is likely minor in the principal results of the study. Note that the ratio of missing temperature data was relatively small; precipitation and sea level datasets used in Giovannettone [33] and Giovannettone et al. [45], respectively, were found to contain much higher percentages of missing data.
Author Response
The paper is almost ready to publication, I report here only one minor issue. The last sentence of Discussion (Finally, the relativley....) is too long, and different things are put together there. I suggest rewording this part with 2 sentences:
The relatively small sample sizes resulting from the use of large sliding window sizes may also have contributed to the found high correlations, although any bias for this reason is likely minor in the principal results of the study. Note that the ratio of missing temperature data was relatively small; precipitation and sea level datasets used in Giovannettone [33] and Giovannettone et al. [45], respectively, were found to contain much higher percentages of missing data.
The author would like to thank the reviewer for this final comment. The reviewer's suggestion did indeed improve the readability of the text as the original sentence was much too long; therefore, the suggested text was used.
