Review of Salerno and Guyennon et al. for ESSD data description paper

25 March 2025

General comments

The manuscript describes and make available an important dataset of weather station data at the elevation of glacier ablation zones in the region. The dataset is useful, unique and I highly recommend that the data is made freely available. However, I don’t think the manuscript is sufficient to support the publication of the dataset in the current version.

Specific comments

The manuscript is structured like a regular research article – this is not necessary for the ESSD dataset description format. I think this might be a contributing factor to why I find the manuscript hard to use as a dataset description paper in the current state. Overall, I think the paper could be restructured to a structure like this:

• Introduction
• Area description
• Data description
  • General AWS description
  • Specific details on maintenance and precipitation undercatch etc..
  • If the data is published with filled gaps, then the gap filling should go here.
• Statistical analysis
  • Statistical method
  • If gap filling is done only for the purpose of the statistical method then the description should go here
  • Results from the statistical analysis
  • Discussion of the statistical analysis
  • Conclusion of the statistical analysis
• Data availability
• Overall conclusion (mainly just summing up)

I don’t think  the data portal description belongs in an ESSD dataset description paper, but I will leave this up to the editor to decide.

I hope the following comments will help clarify:

Section 3.1 gives a nice overview of the location and history of the AWSs and instruments incl. uncertainty is listed in Table 3. However, here I am missing more detail on the instrument’s maintenance schedule, recalibration of hygrometer and a short description of under catch in the precipitation gauge (this is mentioned later but it would be nice to have it already here).

Section 3.3 heavily relies on the description of gap filling method in Salerno et al., 2015 which makes the section hard to understand when you have not read the paper. So, I think the method for gap filling should be elaborated here so this section can stand by itself.

Figure 5: In the total precipitation there is clearly a shift in monthly trend data around 2001. I guess this is likely to be due to a change in instrumentation or logging frequency or something else – but this should be discussed in the main text.

Line by line

38-41: This is interesting – but I don’t think it is relevant in the context of this manuscript.

50: When you write “few” maybe you mean “only few”?

52: It is mentioned section 3.1 line 128-134 that there are stations at higher elevation than the stations mentioned here. Maybe this statement belongs better here in the introduction?

167-168: Perhaps reformulate: Pyramid station has data gaps corresponding to ca. 10 and 15 % of …

262-264: I believe this statement belongs in the results and discussion section especially when referring to another study. One possibility is to split results and discussion in two subsections to make it possible to summarize the findings in the results in the discussion and compare to what other have found.     

Figures and tables

Figure 5: The panels should be marked with a) b) c) and d) and units should be on the y-axis of all subpanels.

Table 2: The caption should be changed so that it starts with the word Percentage (and not %). The first field in the table should describe what is in the top row and first column currently it is just a mini-caption.