An update of IPCC climate reference regions for subcontinental analysis of climate model data: definition and aggregated datasets

Iturbide, Maialen; Gutiérrez, José M.; Alves, Lincoln M.; Bedia, Joaquín; Cerezo-Mota, Ruth; Cimadevilla, Ezequiel; Cofiño, Antonio S.; Di Luca, Alejandro; Faria, Sergio Henrique; Gorodetskaya, Irina V.; Hauser, Mathias; Herrera, Sixto; Hennessy, Kevin; Hewitt, Helene T.; Jones, Richard G.; Krakovska, Svitlana; Manzanas, Rodrigo; Martínez-Castro, Daniel; Narisma, Gemma T.; Nurhati, Intan S.; Pinto, Izidine; Seneviratne, Sonia I.; van den Hurk, Bart; Vera, Carolina S.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-2959-2020

Articles | Volume 12, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-2959-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-2959-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 12, issue 4

Data description paper

|

18 Nov 2020

Data description paper |

| 18 Nov 2020

An update of IPCC climate reference regions for subcontinental analysis of climate model data: definition and aggregated datasets

Maialen Iturbide, José M. Gutiérrez, Lincoln M. Alves, Joaquín Bedia, Ruth Cerezo-Mota, Ezequiel Cimadevilla, Antonio S. Cofiño, Alejandro Di Luca, Sergio Henrique Faria, Irina V. Gorodetskaya, Mathias Hauser, Sixto Herrera, Kevin Hennessy, Helene T. Hewitt, Richard G. Jones, Svitlana Krakovska, Rodrigo Manzanas, Daniel Martínez-Castro, Gemma T. Narisma, Intan S. Nurhati, Izidine Pinto, Sonia I. Seneviratne, Bart van den Hurk, and Carolina S. Vera

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Final revised paper (published on 18 Nov 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 02 Apr 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Comments', Anonymous Referee #1, 04 May 2020
- AC1: 'Response to RC1', Jose Gutierrez, 04 Jul 2020
SC1: 'Australian regions', Michael Grose, 05 May 2020
- AC2: 'Response to SC1', Jose Gutierrez, 04 Jul 2020
SC2: 'Australian regions', Jason Evans, 06 May 2020
- AC3: 'Response to SC2', Jose Gutierrez, 04 Jul 2020
RC2: 'Review of essd-2019-258', Chris Brierley, 27 May 2020
- AC4: 'Responses to RC2', Jose Gutierrez, 04 Jul 2020

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Jose Gutierrez on behalf of the Authors (01 Aug 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (06 Aug 2020) by David Carlson

RR by Chris Brierley (12 Aug 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I would like to thank the authors for a very thorough response to my comment. I am generally satisfied with their work and the revised manuscript’s incorporation of those changes. Whilst I would be happy to see this manuscript now published, I have noticed a few minor additional things that I would commented on beforehand. In no particular order of importance these are:
• Can you put Giorgi in either italics or perhaps quotation marks in the phrase “Giorgi reference regions”? This differentiates the name of the regions from the name of the author.
• Please change “larger number of smaller regions” to “higher number of smaller regions”. This avoids a directly opposite advectives.
• Are you sure that you want to label your new dataset “updated IPCC WGI reference regions”? Calling it “IPCC WGI reference regions, version 2” would allow for subsequent updates. This change would only need to be implemented in one or two places and not the title
• Please remove “used here” after GPCC. It seems unnecessary
• Thank you for providing more clarity about the interpolation. I’m a little unsure why you are interpolating the land and separately. It’s not what I would have done, but I doubt it is wrong. Firstly I would have interpolated the region and land/sea mask onto the data grid (more for computational efficiency rather than anything else). Certainly for interpolating temperature anomalies, I would expect the land to provide some useful additional information for the values over the ocean. I’m not sure that the manuscript needs any changes or discussion of this issues though.
• In the old definitions, CAR was computed across both land and sea combined. Here you seem to redefine it as having separate land and sea values. Can you please document and justify this change?
• I appreciate that you’ve branched a region off for Madagascar. The manuscript text does not mention this however.
• Can you please adopt only 3 letter acronyms for NEAF etc? I suggest dropping the A from these regions.
• In the old definitions, SAS was computed twice having separate land and sea values. Now it is only land (as the neighbouring seas have been branched off). This is fine, but it needs documenting.
• You may want to consider renaming BOB. It’s an English man’s name (unlike the others). Maybe use BGL instead
• I suggest you find a different acronym for ARS. It’s too close to the slight rude English word “arse” for comfort.
• In the old definitions, SEA was computed twice, having separate land and sea values. This convention has now been introduced for MED, but dropped for South East Asia. Not only is this choice not documented, I don’t understand the reason for it.
• I appreciate the additional text you have added about the oceans and coast. I feel that a few sentence explaining the ocean regions would be helpful. Whilst they are mainly self-explanatory, I know that the definition of the Southern Ocean is somewhat fluid. Personally, I’m happy with your choice, but I still think that you should justify it.
• The definition of the equatorial band of the oceans has expanded to 10oS to either 7.6oN or 7oN (according to the csv file on GitHub) from the conventional 5oS-5oN (used in the old regions and for Nino averages). I guess this is due Sri Lanka – but again you ought to justify and document this.
• I would change “single run” to “one ensemble member per model” in the sentence about the aggregated-dataset directory.
• Please change “evidences” to something like “project”. Evidence is too strong for something based on model projections.
• Would it be possible to alter the acknowledgements sentence to acknowledge the Australian commentators and to note that I chose to waive my anonymity.
• The caption for Fig. 6 discuss 55 regions. Please update.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (14 Aug 2020) by David Carlson

AR by Jose Gutierrez on behalf of the Authors (24 Aug 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (25 Aug 2020) by David Carlson

AR by Jose Gutierrez on behalf of the Authors (04 Sep 2020)

Short summary

We present an update of the IPCC WGI reference regions used in AR5 for the synthesis of climate change information. This revision was guided by the basic principles of climatic consistency and model representativeness (in particular for the new CMIP6 simulations). We also present a new dataset of monthly CMIP5 and CMIP6 spatially aggregated information using the new reference regions and describe a worked example of how to use this dataset to inform regional climate change studies.