Completeness of radiosonde humidity observations based on the Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive

Ferreira, António P.; Nieto, Raquel; Gimeno, Luis

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-11-603-2019

Articles | Volume 11, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-11-603-2019

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-11-603-2019

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

Articles | Volume 11, issue 2

09 May 2019

| 09 May 2019

Completeness of radiosonde humidity observations based on the Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive

António P. Ferreira, Raquel Nieto, and Luis Gimeno

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Final revised paper (published on 09 May 2019)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 15 Oct 2018)
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Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Review of the manuscript by Ferreira et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 23 Nov 2018
- AC1: 'Reply to first referee comments', Antonio Paulo Ferreira, 08 Jan 2019
  - AC3: 'Corrected version of reply to reviewer #1', Antonio Paulo Ferreira, 09 Jan 2019
RC2: 'review', Anonymous Referee #2, 23 Nov 2018
- AC2: 'Reply to second referee comments', Antonio Paulo Ferreira, 08 Jan 2019

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Antonio Paulo Ferreira on behalf of the Authors (08 Feb 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (10 Feb 2019) by David Carlson

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (01 Mar 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

After the first review stage, the manuscript “Completeness of radiosonde humidity observations based on the IGRA” by António P. Ferreira, Raquel Nieto, Luis Gimeno, has been significantly improved. The authors considered most of the reviewers’ comments discussing the way they totally or partly accepted many of the received comments.

I think the manuscript is in a better shape now.

I provide the authors with a few minor revisions, which to my opinion must be still considered to complete the good work they did and to avoid confusion in the reader.

I appreciated the changes in the abstract to reduce the misperception that the scope of the paper is to demonstrate that the described the data may support or not climate studies. I think the work already done by the authors to smooth the text should be further refined providing at the top of the manuscript (the first time this is mentioned) what they mean for "completeness". The authors concretely describe in the text, in particular, in section 2.3.2, that data completeness indicates the “regularity and continuity” of the available radiosounding: I think that a definition of the concept of completeness should be provided at top of the manuscript to further clarify the objectives of the paper.

Abstract L16: GCOES Upper-Air Network (GUAN), acronym must be corrected in "GCOS".
1. at lines P1 L23-25, the authors state “This overview indicates that the number of radiosonde stations having a record length potentially long enough (multi-decadal) for climate studies involving humidity-related quantities depends not only on the temporal range, but also on the continuity, regularity and vertical sampling of the humidity time-series.” I think in this sentence they may provide the impression that the paper quantifies the number of radiosonde station providing a good “climate data record”. If I am not wrong they do not quantify this number but they provide a dataset where this quantification is possible for each specific climate application. The could be abetter clarified in the manuscript. at lines P1 L23-25, the authors state “This overview indicates that the number of radiosonde stations having a record length potentially long enough (multi-decadal) for climate studies involving humidity-related quantities depends not only on the temporal range, but also on the continuity, regularity and vertical sampling of the humidity time-series.” I think in this sentence the authors may provide the impression that the paper quantifies the number of radiosonde station able to provide a good “climate data record”. If I am not wrong they do not quantify this number, instead they provide a dataset whose value can be quantifies for each specific climate application. This could be better clarified in the manuscript.

2. I think a comparative study between IGRA v1 and IGRA v2 could be at least mentioned as an outlook study for future studies given that the discrepancy between the two data version has been noticed by several scientists.

3. Moreover, going to the description of IGRA data archive in the manuscript, though the NOAA’s IGRA web page says, “over 2700 stations are available, but if the authors read the page until the end you will notice the following sentence: "The period of record of The IGRA data varies from station to station and among variables. Approximately 1,000 of the over 2,700 IGRA stations are currently reporting data.”. Discussion in many context and also in the IGRA v2 paper are in compliance with this sentence which gives the real picture of the IGRA database at present. I think you must add this to your descriptionto also better introduce the data analysis shown in the manuscript (e.g. Figure 3 and related text).

4. at P11, L4, I0d change the text from:

GRUAN aims to serve as reference to other radiosonde networks, by providing long-term high-quality
records of vertical profiles of selected essential climate variables, accompanied by traceable estimates of
measurement uncertainties.

to

GRUAN aims to serve as reference networks, for climate applications, satellite validation and in support of other networks by providing long-term high-quality records of vertical profiles of selected essential climate variables, accompanied by traceable estimates of measurement uncertainties.

GRUAN aims to serve as reference networks, for climate application, satellite validation and in support of other radiosonde networks by providing long-term high-quality records of vertical profiles of selected essential climate variables, accompanied by traceable estimates of measurement uncertainties.

5. Finally, I want to remark again that not al the figures are of enough quality. They should be improved and the authors declared to be glad to work on it. I hope in the next stage of the paper production this will be recommended to the authors. Moreover, I’d suggest a careful revision to remove a few typos

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (03 Mar 2019) by David Carlson

AR by Antonio Paulo Ferreira on behalf of the Authors (13 Mar 2019)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (19 Mar 2019) by David Carlson

AR by Antonio Paulo Ferreira on behalf of the Authors (07 Apr 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (10 Apr 2019) by David Carlson

AR by Antonio Paulo Ferreira on behalf of the Authors (18 Apr 2019)

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Short summary

The completeness of global radiosonde humidity observations taken over time is studied based on IGRA data. The study illustrates how the number of long-term time series depends on the required frequency, continuity, and vertical sampling of data, in addition to record length. Furthermore, a dataset with metadata related to IGRA is described. It is hoped that such metadata will help climate and environmental scientists to find the most complete in situ observations meeting their research needs.