The Environment and Climate Change Canada solid precipitation intercomparison data from Bratt's Lake and Caribou Creek, Saskatchewan

Smith, Craig D.; Yang, Daqing; Ross, Amber; Barr, Alan

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-11-1337-2019

Articles | Volume 11, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-11-1337-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Water, ecosystem, cryosphere, and climate data from the interior...

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-11-1337-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 11, issue 3

30 Aug 2019

| 30 Aug 2019

The Environment and Climate Change Canada solid precipitation intercomparison data from Bratt's Lake and Caribou Creek, Saskatchewan

Craig D. Smith, Daqing Yang, Amber Ross, and Alan Barr

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Final revised paper (published on 30 Aug 2019)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 01 Oct 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of Smith et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 31 Oct 2018
SC1: 'RC2: 'Review of Smith et al.', Anonymous Referee #2', Ted Hogg, 05 Nov 2018
- SC2: 'Re: SC1', Ted Hogg, 05 Nov 2018
RC2: 'Third Referee Review', John Kochendorfer, 09 Nov 2018
AC1: 'Author's response to referees comments', Craig Smith, 02 Jan 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Craig Smith on behalf of the Authors (23 Jan 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (22 Feb 2019) by Warren D. Helgason

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (17 Mar 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The error is located at
Page 8, Line 32
"..SWE measurements, calculated as the product of the mean transect snow depth(n=50) and the mean transect density (n=5)"

This is incorrect. The mean transect SWE (not the SWE measurement) is a product of the mean depth and the mean density, with the addition of the covariance between the depth
and density. This is very well established in the literature,
see Faria, D.A., Pomeroy, J.W. and Essery, R.L.H., 2000. Effect of covariance between ablation and snow water equivalent on depletion of snow‐covered area in a forest. Hydrological Processes, 14(15), pp.2683-2695.

Minor corrections and suggestions
Page 2 Line 10
"The DFAR configuration consists of the same large
octagonal double wind fence used by the WMO Double Fence Intercomparison Reference"
Is the the very same fence, or just the same type of fence? If the former, no change is required.

Line 15
"a catch efficiency of 94%, 92% and 90%"
Should probably be "catch efficiencies'

Page 5 Line 36
"diurnal oscillations in the bucket weight signal"
This is very interesting - is this a well known issue in the precipitation measurement community?
It would be useful to have some speculation on the
cause, i.e. is it an issue with the electronics, or is it some
type of condensation?

Page 6 Line 5
"positive or larger changes"
I'm not sure what this means.

Page 7 Line 28
"-999"

The use of quotation marks around -999 implies that it is a character string
in the file, which may be confusing to people using the data.

I would suggest rewriting the sentence to indicate that this is a numerical value, e.g.
Missing data in the SK SPICE dataset were set to a value of -999...

Note that sometimes the precipitation flag is "1" and sometimes it is 1,
which is also confusing

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (27 May 2019) by Warren D. Helgason

AR by Craig Smith on behalf of the Authors (11 Jun 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (09 Jul 2019) by Warren D. Helgason

AR by Craig Smith on behalf of the Authors (12 Jul 2019) Manuscript

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Short summary

During and following the WMO Solid Precipitation Inter-Comparison Experiment (SPICE), winter (2013–2017) precipitation intercomparison data sets were collected at two test sites in Saskatchewan: Caribou Creek in the southern boreal forest and Bratt's Lake on the prairies. Precipitation was measured by the WMO automated reference and can be compared to measurements made by gauge configurations commonly used in Canada to examine issues with systematic bias.