Underwater light environment in Arctic fjords

Schlegel, Robert W.; Singh, Rakesh Kumar; Gentili, Bernard; Bélanger, Simon; Castro de la Guardia, Laura; Krause-Jensen, Dorte; Miller, Cale A.; Sejr, Mikael; Gattuso, Jean-Pierre

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-16-2773-2024

Articles | Volume 16, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-16-2773-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-16-2773-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 16, issue 6

Data description paper

|

14 Jun 2024

Data description paper |

| 14 Jun 2024

Underwater light environment in Arctic fjords

Robert W. Schlegel, Rakesh Kumar Singh, Bernard Gentili, Simon Bélanger, Laura Castro de la Guardia, Dorte Krause-Jensen, Cale A. Miller, Mikael Sejr, and Jean-Pierre Gattuso

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Final revised paper (published on 14 Jun 2024)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 08 Dec 2023)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

RC1:
'Comment on essd-2023-462', Anonymous Referee #1, 30 Jan 2024

The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2023-462/essd-2023-462-RC1-supplement.pdf

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-462-RC1
- AC1:
  'Reply on RC1', Robert Schlegel, 05 Feb 2024
  We would like to thank the reviewer for their constructive comments on this manuscript. While we disagree that PAR data are 'qualitative' because they are related to other environmental variables, perhaps there is a language barrier issue interfering with our understanding of the reviewers criticism and their motivation for a major revision. Particularly considering how few specific comments there are.
  
  That being said, when revising the manuscript we aim to address all issues that the reviewer has raised. Specifically:
  
  Figure 1 will be completely overhauled. All horizontal scales of the fjords will be added, as well as isobath lines and a table will be added showing how many shallow and coastal pixels are available per site. In this figure and all others, the colour palette for the sites will be changed to a new one that shows much clearer contrast.
  
  A new table will be added containing the metadata for the optics sensors used. E.g. name, period of coverage, spatial and temporal completeness, etc.
  
  A new table will be provided that shows the statistics of the good vs. bad pixels and exactly how many days were available per month.
  
  The colour palette for the sites will be changed for all relevant figures.
  
  The method of downscaling from 1 km to ~50 - 200 m will be more clearly explained. Accompanied by an appropriate note of caution to users.
  
  We will revisit all of the climatological average values and provide standard deviations where appropriate.
  
  Median values are preferable to mean when describing the seasonal cycle due to the kurtosis (right skew) of the PAR variables. These statistics will be made more clear in the text.
  
  We respectfully disagree that this PAR dataset is 'semi-qualitative'. Perhaps we have a miscommunication issue. We do however agree that the extrapolation of a 20 year time series to a long-term trend should be done with caution, and that the inter-annual variability is likely more related to the physical phenomenon mentioned in your comment. When editing the discussion we will take this point into consideration and comment on it accordingly.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-462-AC1
RC2:
'Comment on essd-2023-462', Anonymous Referee #2, 22 Apr 2024

General comment: the paper described a gridded dataset covering 2003-2022 of PAR in a selected number of Artic Fjords. The paper is well written and the information well organised even if it’s not clear what are the complementary information/data/observation required by this methodology. A key point is missing, the uncertainty associated to the explained methodology and the accuracy of the information of this dataset. There is no comparison with any other methodology that can be used in this field, is this the only way for estimating gridded PAR in Arctic areas? A critical description of the chosen methodology, its limitations and how it performs compare to others is missing.

An interesting point would be to explain the sustainability of this methodology for updating the existing this timeserie.

Specific comment:

Page 7 line 154: The fjords of Northen Norway …. Looking at figure 1 and Table 1 there is only 1 fjord in Norway.

Page 15 , 3.2 Bottom values…. The description of table 3 and figure 4 has no additional information than describing the values. Is there a way to provide a clear message to the reader on the meaning of these values?

Pag. 17 line 364: which is figure S1?

Pag. 17 line 372: same for figure S2

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-462-RC2
- AC2:
  'Reply on RC2', Robert Schlegel, 26 Apr 2024
  We would like to thank the reviewer for their constructive comments on this manuscript. While we do not think that it is within the scope of this manuscript to provide comparisons between the methodology used to generate the dataset discussed within this paper and any other methodology that may exist, we have looked through the literature and do not find any other alternatives. As for the uncertainty that may exist around values generated with the methodology, this is all very well documented within Singh et al. (2022) and we also do not think it is within the scope of an ESSD dataset paper to go into this level of detail. We rather focus here on the dataset and its potential use cases.
  We agree with the reviewer that it would be interesting to comment on how readily this dataset could be updated, year-on-year, so we will add a couple of sentences to the conclusion section.
  
  Specific comment:
  
  While true that there is only one Northern Norwegian fjord in the study area, we state early on in the manuscript that this one site is representative of Northern Norwegian fjords generally. We will endeavour to remove any ambiguity about this throughout the text.
  
  Because Section 3.2 is meant to report on the results, and their context is discussed in detail in Section 5 P2, we do not want to repeat to much text here. We will however add a sentence to the end of Section 3.2 P1 giving the reader the context of why the numbers are important.
  
  We regret that the reviewer was not able to find Figures S1 and S2. We will ensure that they are available in the material upon the following submission.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-462-AC2

Peer review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision | EF: Editorial file upload

AR by Robert Schlegel on behalf of the Authors (29 Apr 2024) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (30 Apr 2024) by Alberto Ribotti

AR by Robert Schlegel on behalf of the Authors (07 May 2024)

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Short summary

Fjords play a vital role in the Arctic ecosystems and human communities. It is therefore important to have as clear of an understanding of the processes within these systems as possible. While temperature and salinity tend to be well measured, light is usually not. The dataset described in this paper uses remotely sensed data from 2003 to 2022 to address this problem by providing high-spatial-resolution surface, water column, and seafloor light data for several well-studied Arctic fjords.