the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 15 Feb 2024
Data supporting the North Atlantic Climate System: Integrated Studies (ACSIS) programme, including atmospheric composition, oceanographic and sea ice observations (2016–2022) and output from ocean, atmosphere, land and sea-ice models (1950–2050)
Abstract. The North Atlantic Climate System: Integrated Study (ACSIS) was a large multidisciplinary research programme funded by the United Kingdom’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). ACSIS ran from 2016–22 and brought together around 80 scientists from seven leading UK-based environmental research institutes to deliver major advances in understanding North Atlantic climate variability and extremes. Here we present an overview of the data generated by the ACSIS programme. The datasets cover the full North Atlantic System comprising: the North Atlantic Ocean, the atmosphere above it including its composition, Arctic Sea Ice and the Greenland Ice Sheet.
Atmospheric composition datasets include measurements from 7 aircraft campaigns (between 3 and 10 flights each, 0–10 km altitude range) in the north eastern Atlantic (~40° W–5° E,~15° N–55° N) made at intervals of from 6 months to 2 years between February 2017 and may 2022. The flights measured chemical species (including greenhouse gases, ozone precursors and VOCs) and aerosols (organic, SO4, NH4, NO3, and nss-Cl) (https://dx.doi.org/10.5285/6285564c34a246fc9ba5ce053d85e5e7 (FAAM et al. (2024)). Ground based stations at the Cape Verde Atmospheric Observatory (CVAO), Penlee Point Atmospheric Observatory (PPAO) and Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) recorded ozone, ozone precursors, halocarbons, as well as greenhouse gases (CO2, methane), SO2 and photolysis rates. (CVAO, http://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/81693aad69409100b1b9a247b9ae75d5, National Centre for Atmospheric Science et al. (2014)), O3 and CH4 (PPAO, https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/8f1ff8ea77534e08b03983685990a9b0 (Plymouth Marine Laboratory and Yang (2024)) and aerosols (PML, https://dx.doi.org/10.5285/e74491c96ef24df29a9342a3d57b5939, Smyth (2024)).
Complementary model simulations of atmospheric composition were performed with the UK Earth System Model, UKESM1, for the period 1982 to 2020 using CMIP6 historical forcing up to 2014 and SSP3-7.0 scenario from 2015–2020. Model temperature and winds were relaxed towards ERA reanalysis. Monthly mean model data for ozone, NO, NO2, CO, methane, stratospheric ozone tracers and 30 regionally emitted tracers are available to download (https://data.ceda.ac.uk/badc/acsis/UKESM1-hindcasts, Abraham (2024)).
ACSIS also generated new ocean heat content diagnostics https://doi.org/10/g6wm, https://doi.org/10/g8g2, Moat et al. (2021a–b) and gridded temperature and salinity based on objectively mapped Argo measurements https://doi.org/10.5285/fe8e524d-7f04-41f3-e053-6c86abc04d51 (King (2023).
An ensemble of atmosphere-forced global ocean-sea ice simulations using the NEMO-CICE model was performed with horizontal resolutions of ¼° and 1/12° covering the period 1958–2020 using several different atmosphere reanalysis based surface forcing datasets, supplemented by additional global simulations and standalone sea ice model simulations with advanced sea ice physics using the CICE model (http://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/770a885a8bc34d51ad71e87ef346d6a8, Megann et al. (2021e). Output is stored as monthly averages and includes 3D potential temperature, salinity, zonal, meridional and vertical velocity; 2D sea surface height, mixed layer depth, surface heat and freshwater fluxes, ice concentration and thickness and a wide variety of other variables.
In addition to the data presented here we provide a brief overview of several other datasets that were generated during ACSIS which have been described previously in the literature.
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RC1: 'Comment on essd-2023-405', Anonymous Referee #1, 05 Jun 2024
Review of
Data supporting the North Atlantic Climate System: Integrated Studies (ACSIS) programme, including atmospheric composition, oceanographic and sea ice observations (2016-2022) and output from ocean, atmosphere, land and sea-ice models (1950-2050)
by A. T. Archibald et al.
Summary: This is a very heterogeneous data set publications wherein the authors try to assemble a suite of physical and chemical observations that in one way or the other have to do with the ACSIS programme. The wealth of the data sets mentioned and described is immense. Overall, I find that the authors solved the challenge to group the different data sets into thematic containers quite well. Naturally, the diversity of the data sets and sources means that the manuscript contains quite a number of tables but this is ok given the heterogeneity of the data sets mentioned. Also, the paper provides a convincing list of links to respective respositories where the data, which are partly a subset of larger collectons, can be accessed. Overall, I find this manuscript useful. I have a number of concerns, though, that I would ask the authors to think about and iterate the manuscript accordingly - as specified in my general comments and also in my specific comments.
General Comments:
GC1: This data set publication contains - to my taste - a too large amount of results from pre-liminary data set analysis that is better to be put into other publications. There are quite some paragraphs in this manuscript as written, which read like an advertizement of the many things that have already been done with the data and/or that could potentially be done with data. I do not find this appropriate for a data set publication of this kind. You find more about this in my specific comments.
GC2: At the same time, the manuscript - as written - is overly light when it comes to detail data set quality, reliability and limitations of use. While I understand that the majority of the data sets mentioned here stem from in situ observations, more emphasis on uncertainty sources and potentially limited reliability of the data obtained would immensely assist users in doing a good job when utilizing your data in their research.
GC3: Section 5 contains a - to me somewhat unmotivated - addition of other data sets that may or may not be already published in the context of ACSIS. This I find sub-optimal and I suggest to only keep those data set descriptions of section 5 that immediately have to do with the suite of data that is published with this data set publication AND put the respective information either into a separate section after the introduction or to split section 5 and include the respective information into the specific subsections to which these auxiliary data directly contribute. See my specific comment in this regard.
GC4: Quite a number of the figures and illustrations need further work to make the content readable; a few errors need to be corrected. See my specific and editoral comments in this regard.Specific Comments:
L115: Maybe consider to have such a footprint map in this data science paper as well?
L161 / Table 2: There are two Ozone measurement instruments that seem to have been used in succession. How was the inter-instrument calibration carried out to ensure that the ozone measurements of the two instruments are comparable?
L190: What is the scientific rationale to perform this grouping? Isn't the density of measurements changing a lot with altitude so that a linear grouping is perhaps not optimal?
Figure 2:
- I understand that all six panels show a mixing ratio. However, it would increase the readability of the panels if you'd remove the titles and instead include the respective information into the x-axis caption, i.e. "NO mixing ratio [ppt]" or "CO mixing ratio [ppb]".
- Another area of improvement would be to use the same y-axis scaling. Currently these differ between the top four panels and the bottom two panels.
- Also, I count nine bins in the bottom two panels but ten bins in the top four panels. None of these fit to the noted 1000 m bin chosen.
- While the bottom two panels seem to fit to the maximum measurement altitude of 7600 m mentioned in the text, the top four panels do not. Please correct the panels and/or correct also the text since it does not fit to these panels.
- Does the vertical line shown in the boxes denote the mean or the median value?
- Does the horizontal extent of the boxes denote the interquartile range, i.e. from 0.25 to 0.75?
- Do the bars extending left and right from the box denote 1, 2, or 3 standard deviations?L193-195: I am not sure I understand correctly. Has the filtering that is mentioned here been done only for the sake of improving the readability of the panels shown? Or were data excluded from the data set? If the latter, what is the scientific rationale to exclude those high mixing ratios?
L198-204:
- I am not convinced that the provided ascii files (one kind with comma separation, one kind with empty space separation) are an overly user-friendly access point to the wealth of data that is going to be published here. Making this data available in netCDF file format would be substantially more useful. The authors might want to motivate why they decided to not make an effort to provide the data in both, ascii text and netCDF file format.
- Please check this paragraph for "merge file" vs. "merged file" [correct], and also check for punctuations; one is missing in L203 while one is too much in L204.L228+++ (all subsections 2.2.1-2.2.4)
- I am not sure I understand why this paper, dedicated to be a data set publication, comes up with first analysis of the data with respect to trends in all these subsections and also gives recommendations as to which certain gas concentrations are supposed to be modeled so that the model results comply with the observations.
- Shouldn't a data set publication primarily focus on presenting the data and, if at all, providing information about the data quality and evaluation / quality assessment activities and results rather than taking already the step of a scientific analysis?L261: I note that the data are not freely available per se but require registration and/or a login.
L290: Again I am not sure whether the content of this subsection fits with a data set publication paper. If it is for quality assessment then I would have expected a notion into that direction but I could not find one. And therefore this subsection reads like the start of the data analysis.
Figure 7:
- It is not clear what the panels a) and b) are in Figure 7. The respective labels a) and b) are missing in the figure.
- I also suggest to clarify in the caption of the figure the meaning of JFM, MAM and so forth.
- "DU" is "Dobson Units"? You might want to spell this out in the legend annotation for clarity.
- What is "Tg" denoting in the four panels of a)? I assume Teragrams?
- What is "STT" denoting?L430-436: This paragraph simply reads as an advertisement of the many papers that resulted out of the ACSIS activities - but it has not direct implication to better describing or illustrating the data and their quality themselves.
L440: Which are these "sophisticated techniques"? Please name them and provide a reference as this is important to judge the credibility of the methods used and hence of the data set created.
L488: "drift" --> I don't understand what you want to illustrate with this model drift. Is it good to see that the salinity in the upper 1000 meters develops into completely different directions for DFS5.2 compared to for CORE2 (and JRA-55)? I don't understand, whether what you show here is meant to be an indicator of the "quality" or "reliability" of the model results. Please invest some more writing into this topic if deemed required - also because the next section gets back to "drift".
Figure 12:
- I am a bit puzzled by a "surface current magnitude" with a unit m s-2; this is an acceleration. Anomalies (as shown) should have the same unit as the regular variable.
- I note that the title underneath the panels on the left says: "Surface speed (m s-1)"; here the unit is correct but the quantity needs to be corrected to "surface current speed anomalies".
- What is the rationale to use a classical two-color (blue to red) color bar for the SSH anomalies but a color bar which makes distinction between positive and negative anomalies overly difficult for the surface current speed anomalies. I recommend to change this.L566-577: What you write in this paragraph is certainly interesting. But does it support a data set paper or isn't this better to be placed in, e.g., Journal of Geophysical Research - Oceans?
L568/569: The maps shown in the left panels in Figure 12 do not contain any direction information. Therefore this notion about "current shifts direction" is not backed up credibly by the figure as shown.
L581/582: It is not clear what these T, U, V, W grids are. Is "T" refering to time? Are "U", "V", and "W" refering to eastward positive, northward positive and upward positive (?) components of the 3-D ocean current? Please clarify.
Figure 13:
This cannot be the sea ice volume - simply because the unit does not fit. CryoSat-2 provides estimates of the sea ice thickness. To compute the sea ice volume one needs to combine the thickness with the sea ice area. Please check what you are showing in this figure and correct it, including the y-axis annotation and the caption. Also in the text (as in the legend) it needs to be "CryoSat-2", i.e. a capital "S".L625 ... Section 5: I recommend to delete this entire section. For me this is blowing up this data set publication beyond the focus it initially had.
I can see that this section contains descriptions of data sets that have been used in the manuscript for, e.g., inter-comparison purposes such as the CryoSat-2 sea ice thickness data set. These additional descriptions and data sets should, however, be put into a subsection, perhaps named "Auxiliary data sets", which should be placed after the introduction. There those data sets that are mandatory to understand your data set publication should be described. Any additional data set descriptions, advertisements, results of preliminary analyses of these that do not inform about data set quality and/or usage limitations should be left out. Alternatively, if you don't like the idea of a separate subsection, then I recommend to include the respective descriptions of the auxiliary data sets in those sections into which these belong; this means for instance that the CryoSat-2 data set description should go into section 4.Typos / Editoral Comments:
L50 Typo "may" --> "May"
L165: Perhaps add "ARA" after ACSIS for clarity?
Figure 3:
- The legend given underneath the figure would benefit from increasing the symbol size and line thickness to better discriminate the different colors.
- The y-axis title denotes "chemical species" but with that does not include the wind speed and temperature. I suggest to correct this accordingly.L275: "very wide sector" --> On the web page it says from 110 to 240 degrees direction; you could be more specific in the text.
L339: You refer to "Fig 6b" but the panels in Figure 6 do not have labels a) and b).
L421: Typo? "bought" --> "brought"
L426: Check for blanks ... "below(King, 2023) . On ..."
L458: This needs to be "King, 2023", right?
L464: I am a bit surprised that the annual low pass filter begins in year 2 and ends in the last but one year. Wouldn't such a filter come into affect already after half a year and also end just half a year before the end of the time series?
L477: "met" --> "meteorological"
L478: I think "heat" can be deleted as the fluxes you are refering to are exclusively radiative ones.
L492-494: You may consider to remove this last sentence about your expectations.
Figure 9: Fonts used are way too small and need to be increased (except the experiment names and variable names, of course).
L521/528: There is no section 4.4.1 in this paper.
L522: The integration time given is one year shorter than the time for the forcing data set (L514) which extends to 2021 instead of 2020.
L528: It might make sense to edit the "1/4 degree" the same way as you write the 1/12 degree - here, elsewhere and in the subsection title.
L530: Typo: "how" --> "show"
L537: Typo: "from" --> "From"
L538: The surface heat flux is ...? Latent and sensible heat fluxes?
Figure 11:
- Again the font size is too small in basically all panels.
- I suggest to use a), b), ... to denote the panels instead of refering to "bottom left" et cet.
L551: 1/2 needs to be changed to 1/12; I also suggest to write "Time series" instead of "Trends".L567: "surface velocity" --> not consistent to what is shown in the figure = surface current speed anomalies.
L571: "is missing" --> "is almost missing"
L608: "Cyrosat-2" --> "CryoSat-2".
What is the source of the data you used?L767: "ice sheets" --> I don't think I found results of the ice sheets in this data set publication ...
L778: "been described" ? Please check.
L834: "2016" --> "(2016)"
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-405-RC1 -
RC2: 'Comment on essd-2023-405', Anonymous Referee #2, 09 Jul 2024
The manuscript presents several observational and model datasets for the study of North Atlantic climate variability. The datasets are new and useful and of high quality, and I think they are appropriate for publication in ESSD. The presentation is sometimes unclear. I have some minor comments on the presentation of the datasets and the figures, detailed below.
General comments:
- The description of the datasets sometimes lack context explaining how they contribute to better understanding the North Atlantic climate and the objectives of ACSIS. This is sometimes specified for the modeling datasets, for example l. 470 “to provide a tool for scientific investigation of the mechanisms of variability of the AMOC and other modes of variability of the Atlantic Ocean”. The collection of datasets presented here is very broad, and the manuscript would be easier to follow if the beginning of each dataset subsection contained such reminders (for example 2.1, 2.2 2.3).
- The manuscript goes into very different levels of details depending on the subsections, and would benefit from a more consistent style. Several subsections (see below) include detailed analysis that are in my opinion not appropriate for ESSD and could be removed, in order to focus on the description of the data and their limitations.
- The text on several of the figures is too small and sometimes not readable at all.
- Are the atmospheric, ocean and ice modelling datasets meant to be used in synergy? If yes, can you comment on the limitations from using different atmospheric forcing datasets?
SPECIFIC COMMENTS:
L48-49: I think it would be best to write “measurements from 7 aircraft campaigns (N total number of flights)” rather than the range of number of flights per campaign.
L155-158: Table 1 mentions aerosol data. Can you also quickly remind here what kind of aerosol data was observed?
L161-162: As a modeler it is often very useful for me to know about the lower detection limit of the instruments, especiallyif these values are reached during the flight. Can this information be added to the table or discussed here, and can you confirm that this information present in the data files?
Figure 1: Please consider putting the Atom flights last in the legend and separate Atom flights more clearly from your ACSIS flights in the legend (grouping/spacing the legend entries and/or adding headers in the legend).
2.1 I found the organization of this section confusing. 2.1 starts with a long text on the flight data without a top subsection, and is followed by very short subsections 2.1.1 to 2.1.3. I think it would be more understandable if it was structured differently. For example: 2.1.1 description of the campaign flights (with Figure 1 and Table 3) 2.1.2 instrumentation 2.1.3 vertical distribution of pollutants, 2.1.4 data archive. I think Table 3 is useful for complementing Figure 1 but I don’t see the point of putting it into a separate “bulk analysis” section and I think the associated text has little to do with Table 3, and could instead be attached to the subsection where Figure 2 is found.
L205-209: I am not familiar with how these observatories operate so this question might make little sense, but since these observations began before ACSIS can you maybe clarify how this data is new as part of the ACSIS programme, for example how ACSIS contributed to the new data?
L216-220: I think this analysis is too detailed for an ESSD paper and could be removed entirely, being replaced at the beginning of 2.2 by a more high-level short sentence on how the CVAO data contributes to ACSIS objectives, see general comments.
Figure 3 – The text is very small on the figure
2.2.1 to 2.2.4: These sections go in much more detail than the rest of the subsections, and includes preliminary analysis on trends that could in my opinion be removed (See general comments). You could instead consider showing the observation time series for these species in a new figure, and additional details on the limitations of the data.
2.3 My comments on section 2.2 also aply here (needs a high-level description of the role of this data in ACSIS, maybe clarify the novelty of this data as part of ACSIS, and the analysis might be too detailed for an ESSD paper)
L293 – “NAME” I suppose the model name is missing here? See also next comment.
2.3.1 The sector analysis is in my opinion too detailed. However, if it is included here; there also needs to be an introduction to why and how the sector analysis was done, and information about the backtrajectory model and its setup in a separate subsection. If I understand correctly, this airmass history modeling dataset was already published, so it could also be removed from this section and included in section 5.
Figure 4 – The text is also too small on the figure.
L.355-363: Can you remind here at the beginning what this dataset is used for in ACSIS? (See general comment)
2.4: Can you also specify here the types of variables predicted by the models and present in the dataset (e.g. trace gases, aerosols, atmospheric dynamics, others)? Right now this description makes it seem like this is only a forced tracer simulation. The description of the dataset in the README file is more clear but I suppose this is only for a subset of the variables: “The following fields are contained in the dataset: O3, NO, NO2, CO, CH4, 4x Stratospheric O3 tracers, and 30x idealised tracers emitted from various locations (15 with a 5-day e-folding lifetime, and 15 with a 30-day e-folding lifetime). Data is provided in mass mixing ratio (kg species/kg air).”
Figure 7 – I think you can label the panels a-e and specify that a-c are showing seasonal averages in the caption.
L469 - “as a deliverable for WP2.3 of ACSIS” I think this can be removed.
Figure 9 and Figure 11 – The text is too small and not readable at all.
Sections 3 and 4 - I am not fully qualified to review these sections but found them well written and clear with no obvious issues.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-405-RC2 -
AC1: 'Comment on essd-2023-405', Bablu Sinha, 27 Sep 2024
The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2023-405/essd-2023-405-AC1-supplement.pdf
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EC1: 'Comment on essd-2023-405', Baptiste Vandecrux, 03 Oct 2024
Dear authors,
Thank you for the detailed response to the reviewers' comments.
I would like to highlight two points raised by the reviewers that, based on your response, may not have been fully addressed.
Reviewer 1 stated "Section 5: I recommend deleting this entire section."
It seems that whether dispersed throughout the manuscript or centralized in a single section, this information disrupts the flow for readers. I recommend significantly shortening Section 5. Seven pages to describe previously published work is more suited to a review paper than a dataset description. You could condense this into a "Potential Synergy with Previously Published Work" section, where you list studies that can be used in combination with the presented data. This should remain at a high level, for example: "The data presented in Sections X and Y could be used in combination with simulations of aerosol from volcanic eruptions (Arfeuille et al., 2013; Luo, 2016...), also produced under the auspices of ACSIS." In this section, the data you presented in Sections 2 and 3 should be the focus, with auxiliary data mentioned only in terms of how they complement the main datasets. This section should not exceed 1.5-2 pages.
Reviewer 2 stated, "Section 2.3.1: The sector analysis is, in my opinion, too detailed."
Indeed, it is too detailed for a simple illustration of the dataset. Please focus on one of the two methods to define the open ocean. If you prefer, you can mention that an alternative approach using NAME was also investigated, yielding similar results. Consider removing Figure 4 if its primary purpose is to show the identification of ocean air masses from wind direction. Figure 4b and its accompanying description are not very conclusive and could also be removed. If you'd still like to include a plot of the O3 data, you could add it as a panel in Figure 5, aligned with the methane data. Please also update the plot to include the latest data (currently stopping at early 2021).
Finally, I recommend making all your plotting scripts available in a repository. This would enhance the reproducibility of your article and make it easier for readers to re-use the presented dataset.
Sincerely,
Baptiste VandecruxCitation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-405-EC1
Status: closed
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RC1: 'Comment on essd-2023-405', Anonymous Referee #1, 05 Jun 2024
Review of
Data supporting the North Atlantic Climate System: Integrated Studies (ACSIS) programme, including atmospheric composition, oceanographic and sea ice observations (2016-2022) and output from ocean, atmosphere, land and sea-ice models (1950-2050)
by A. T. Archibald et al.
Summary: This is a very heterogeneous data set publications wherein the authors try to assemble a suite of physical and chemical observations that in one way or the other have to do with the ACSIS programme. The wealth of the data sets mentioned and described is immense. Overall, I find that the authors solved the challenge to group the different data sets into thematic containers quite well. Naturally, the diversity of the data sets and sources means that the manuscript contains quite a number of tables but this is ok given the heterogeneity of the data sets mentioned. Also, the paper provides a convincing list of links to respective respositories where the data, which are partly a subset of larger collectons, can be accessed. Overall, I find this manuscript useful. I have a number of concerns, though, that I would ask the authors to think about and iterate the manuscript accordingly - as specified in my general comments and also in my specific comments.
General Comments:
GC1: This data set publication contains - to my taste - a too large amount of results from pre-liminary data set analysis that is better to be put into other publications. There are quite some paragraphs in this manuscript as written, which read like an advertizement of the many things that have already been done with the data and/or that could potentially be done with data. I do not find this appropriate for a data set publication of this kind. You find more about this in my specific comments.
GC2: At the same time, the manuscript - as written - is overly light when it comes to detail data set quality, reliability and limitations of use. While I understand that the majority of the data sets mentioned here stem from in situ observations, more emphasis on uncertainty sources and potentially limited reliability of the data obtained would immensely assist users in doing a good job when utilizing your data in their research.
GC3: Section 5 contains a - to me somewhat unmotivated - addition of other data sets that may or may not be already published in the context of ACSIS. This I find sub-optimal and I suggest to only keep those data set descriptions of section 5 that immediately have to do with the suite of data that is published with this data set publication AND put the respective information either into a separate section after the introduction or to split section 5 and include the respective information into the specific subsections to which these auxiliary data directly contribute. See my specific comment in this regard.
GC4: Quite a number of the figures and illustrations need further work to make the content readable; a few errors need to be corrected. See my specific and editoral comments in this regard.Specific Comments:
L115: Maybe consider to have such a footprint map in this data science paper as well?
L161 / Table 2: There are two Ozone measurement instruments that seem to have been used in succession. How was the inter-instrument calibration carried out to ensure that the ozone measurements of the two instruments are comparable?
L190: What is the scientific rationale to perform this grouping? Isn't the density of measurements changing a lot with altitude so that a linear grouping is perhaps not optimal?
Figure 2:
- I understand that all six panels show a mixing ratio. However, it would increase the readability of the panels if you'd remove the titles and instead include the respective information into the x-axis caption, i.e. "NO mixing ratio [ppt]" or "CO mixing ratio [ppb]".
- Another area of improvement would be to use the same y-axis scaling. Currently these differ between the top four panels and the bottom two panels.
- Also, I count nine bins in the bottom two panels but ten bins in the top four panels. None of these fit to the noted 1000 m bin chosen.
- While the bottom two panels seem to fit to the maximum measurement altitude of 7600 m mentioned in the text, the top four panels do not. Please correct the panels and/or correct also the text since it does not fit to these panels.
- Does the vertical line shown in the boxes denote the mean or the median value?
- Does the horizontal extent of the boxes denote the interquartile range, i.e. from 0.25 to 0.75?
- Do the bars extending left and right from the box denote 1, 2, or 3 standard deviations?L193-195: I am not sure I understand correctly. Has the filtering that is mentioned here been done only for the sake of improving the readability of the panels shown? Or were data excluded from the data set? If the latter, what is the scientific rationale to exclude those high mixing ratios?
L198-204:
- I am not convinced that the provided ascii files (one kind with comma separation, one kind with empty space separation) are an overly user-friendly access point to the wealth of data that is going to be published here. Making this data available in netCDF file format would be substantially more useful. The authors might want to motivate why they decided to not make an effort to provide the data in both, ascii text and netCDF file format.
- Please check this paragraph for "merge file" vs. "merged file" [correct], and also check for punctuations; one is missing in L203 while one is too much in L204.L228+++ (all subsections 2.2.1-2.2.4)
- I am not sure I understand why this paper, dedicated to be a data set publication, comes up with first analysis of the data with respect to trends in all these subsections and also gives recommendations as to which certain gas concentrations are supposed to be modeled so that the model results comply with the observations.
- Shouldn't a data set publication primarily focus on presenting the data and, if at all, providing information about the data quality and evaluation / quality assessment activities and results rather than taking already the step of a scientific analysis?L261: I note that the data are not freely available per se but require registration and/or a login.
L290: Again I am not sure whether the content of this subsection fits with a data set publication paper. If it is for quality assessment then I would have expected a notion into that direction but I could not find one. And therefore this subsection reads like the start of the data analysis.
Figure 7:
- It is not clear what the panels a) and b) are in Figure 7. The respective labels a) and b) are missing in the figure.
- I also suggest to clarify in the caption of the figure the meaning of JFM, MAM and so forth.
- "DU" is "Dobson Units"? You might want to spell this out in the legend annotation for clarity.
- What is "Tg" denoting in the four panels of a)? I assume Teragrams?
- What is "STT" denoting?L430-436: This paragraph simply reads as an advertisement of the many papers that resulted out of the ACSIS activities - but it has not direct implication to better describing or illustrating the data and their quality themselves.
L440: Which are these "sophisticated techniques"? Please name them and provide a reference as this is important to judge the credibility of the methods used and hence of the data set created.
L488: "drift" --> I don't understand what you want to illustrate with this model drift. Is it good to see that the salinity in the upper 1000 meters develops into completely different directions for DFS5.2 compared to for CORE2 (and JRA-55)? I don't understand, whether what you show here is meant to be an indicator of the "quality" or "reliability" of the model results. Please invest some more writing into this topic if deemed required - also because the next section gets back to "drift".
Figure 12:
- I am a bit puzzled by a "surface current magnitude" with a unit m s-2; this is an acceleration. Anomalies (as shown) should have the same unit as the regular variable.
- I note that the title underneath the panels on the left says: "Surface speed (m s-1)"; here the unit is correct but the quantity needs to be corrected to "surface current speed anomalies".
- What is the rationale to use a classical two-color (blue to red) color bar for the SSH anomalies but a color bar which makes distinction between positive and negative anomalies overly difficult for the surface current speed anomalies. I recommend to change this.L566-577: What you write in this paragraph is certainly interesting. But does it support a data set paper or isn't this better to be placed in, e.g., Journal of Geophysical Research - Oceans?
L568/569: The maps shown in the left panels in Figure 12 do not contain any direction information. Therefore this notion about "current shifts direction" is not backed up credibly by the figure as shown.
L581/582: It is not clear what these T, U, V, W grids are. Is "T" refering to time? Are "U", "V", and "W" refering to eastward positive, northward positive and upward positive (?) components of the 3-D ocean current? Please clarify.
Figure 13:
This cannot be the sea ice volume - simply because the unit does not fit. CryoSat-2 provides estimates of the sea ice thickness. To compute the sea ice volume one needs to combine the thickness with the sea ice area. Please check what you are showing in this figure and correct it, including the y-axis annotation and the caption. Also in the text (as in the legend) it needs to be "CryoSat-2", i.e. a capital "S".L625 ... Section 5: I recommend to delete this entire section. For me this is blowing up this data set publication beyond the focus it initially had.
I can see that this section contains descriptions of data sets that have been used in the manuscript for, e.g., inter-comparison purposes such as the CryoSat-2 sea ice thickness data set. These additional descriptions and data sets should, however, be put into a subsection, perhaps named "Auxiliary data sets", which should be placed after the introduction. There those data sets that are mandatory to understand your data set publication should be described. Any additional data set descriptions, advertisements, results of preliminary analyses of these that do not inform about data set quality and/or usage limitations should be left out. Alternatively, if you don't like the idea of a separate subsection, then I recommend to include the respective descriptions of the auxiliary data sets in those sections into which these belong; this means for instance that the CryoSat-2 data set description should go into section 4.Typos / Editoral Comments:
L50 Typo "may" --> "May"
L165: Perhaps add "ARA" after ACSIS for clarity?
Figure 3:
- The legend given underneath the figure would benefit from increasing the symbol size and line thickness to better discriminate the different colors.
- The y-axis title denotes "chemical species" but with that does not include the wind speed and temperature. I suggest to correct this accordingly.L275: "very wide sector" --> On the web page it says from 110 to 240 degrees direction; you could be more specific in the text.
L339: You refer to "Fig 6b" but the panels in Figure 6 do not have labels a) and b).
L421: Typo? "bought" --> "brought"
L426: Check for blanks ... "below(King, 2023) . On ..."
L458: This needs to be "King, 2023", right?
L464: I am a bit surprised that the annual low pass filter begins in year 2 and ends in the last but one year. Wouldn't such a filter come into affect already after half a year and also end just half a year before the end of the time series?
L477: "met" --> "meteorological"
L478: I think "heat" can be deleted as the fluxes you are refering to are exclusively radiative ones.
L492-494: You may consider to remove this last sentence about your expectations.
Figure 9: Fonts used are way too small and need to be increased (except the experiment names and variable names, of course).
L521/528: There is no section 4.4.1 in this paper.
L522: The integration time given is one year shorter than the time for the forcing data set (L514) which extends to 2021 instead of 2020.
L528: It might make sense to edit the "1/4 degree" the same way as you write the 1/12 degree - here, elsewhere and in the subsection title.
L530: Typo: "how" --> "show"
L537: Typo: "from" --> "From"
L538: The surface heat flux is ...? Latent and sensible heat fluxes?
Figure 11:
- Again the font size is too small in basically all panels.
- I suggest to use a), b), ... to denote the panels instead of refering to "bottom left" et cet.
L551: 1/2 needs to be changed to 1/12; I also suggest to write "Time series" instead of "Trends".L567: "surface velocity" --> not consistent to what is shown in the figure = surface current speed anomalies.
L571: "is missing" --> "is almost missing"
L608: "Cyrosat-2" --> "CryoSat-2".
What is the source of the data you used?L767: "ice sheets" --> I don't think I found results of the ice sheets in this data set publication ...
L778: "been described" ? Please check.
L834: "2016" --> "(2016)"
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-405-RC1 -
RC2: 'Comment on essd-2023-405', Anonymous Referee #2, 09 Jul 2024
The manuscript presents several observational and model datasets for the study of North Atlantic climate variability. The datasets are new and useful and of high quality, and I think they are appropriate for publication in ESSD. The presentation is sometimes unclear. I have some minor comments on the presentation of the datasets and the figures, detailed below.
General comments:
- The description of the datasets sometimes lack context explaining how they contribute to better understanding the North Atlantic climate and the objectives of ACSIS. This is sometimes specified for the modeling datasets, for example l. 470 “to provide a tool for scientific investigation of the mechanisms of variability of the AMOC and other modes of variability of the Atlantic Ocean”. The collection of datasets presented here is very broad, and the manuscript would be easier to follow if the beginning of each dataset subsection contained such reminders (for example 2.1, 2.2 2.3).
- The manuscript goes into very different levels of details depending on the subsections, and would benefit from a more consistent style. Several subsections (see below) include detailed analysis that are in my opinion not appropriate for ESSD and could be removed, in order to focus on the description of the data and their limitations.
- The text on several of the figures is too small and sometimes not readable at all.
- Are the atmospheric, ocean and ice modelling datasets meant to be used in synergy? If yes, can you comment on the limitations from using different atmospheric forcing datasets?
SPECIFIC COMMENTS:
L48-49: I think it would be best to write “measurements from 7 aircraft campaigns (N total number of flights)” rather than the range of number of flights per campaign.
L155-158: Table 1 mentions aerosol data. Can you also quickly remind here what kind of aerosol data was observed?
L161-162: As a modeler it is often very useful for me to know about the lower detection limit of the instruments, especiallyif these values are reached during the flight. Can this information be added to the table or discussed here, and can you confirm that this information present in the data files?
Figure 1: Please consider putting the Atom flights last in the legend and separate Atom flights more clearly from your ACSIS flights in the legend (grouping/spacing the legend entries and/or adding headers in the legend).
2.1 I found the organization of this section confusing. 2.1 starts with a long text on the flight data without a top subsection, and is followed by very short subsections 2.1.1 to 2.1.3. I think it would be more understandable if it was structured differently. For example: 2.1.1 description of the campaign flights (with Figure 1 and Table 3) 2.1.2 instrumentation 2.1.3 vertical distribution of pollutants, 2.1.4 data archive. I think Table 3 is useful for complementing Figure 1 but I don’t see the point of putting it into a separate “bulk analysis” section and I think the associated text has little to do with Table 3, and could instead be attached to the subsection where Figure 2 is found.
L205-209: I am not familiar with how these observatories operate so this question might make little sense, but since these observations began before ACSIS can you maybe clarify how this data is new as part of the ACSIS programme, for example how ACSIS contributed to the new data?
L216-220: I think this analysis is too detailed for an ESSD paper and could be removed entirely, being replaced at the beginning of 2.2 by a more high-level short sentence on how the CVAO data contributes to ACSIS objectives, see general comments.
Figure 3 – The text is very small on the figure
2.2.1 to 2.2.4: These sections go in much more detail than the rest of the subsections, and includes preliminary analysis on trends that could in my opinion be removed (See general comments). You could instead consider showing the observation time series for these species in a new figure, and additional details on the limitations of the data.
2.3 My comments on section 2.2 also aply here (needs a high-level description of the role of this data in ACSIS, maybe clarify the novelty of this data as part of ACSIS, and the analysis might be too detailed for an ESSD paper)
L293 – “NAME” I suppose the model name is missing here? See also next comment.
2.3.1 The sector analysis is in my opinion too detailed. However, if it is included here; there also needs to be an introduction to why and how the sector analysis was done, and information about the backtrajectory model and its setup in a separate subsection. If I understand correctly, this airmass history modeling dataset was already published, so it could also be removed from this section and included in section 5.
Figure 4 – The text is also too small on the figure.
L.355-363: Can you remind here at the beginning what this dataset is used for in ACSIS? (See general comment)
2.4: Can you also specify here the types of variables predicted by the models and present in the dataset (e.g. trace gases, aerosols, atmospheric dynamics, others)? Right now this description makes it seem like this is only a forced tracer simulation. The description of the dataset in the README file is more clear but I suppose this is only for a subset of the variables: “The following fields are contained in the dataset: O3, NO, NO2, CO, CH4, 4x Stratospheric O3 tracers, and 30x idealised tracers emitted from various locations (15 with a 5-day e-folding lifetime, and 15 with a 30-day e-folding lifetime). Data is provided in mass mixing ratio (kg species/kg air).”
Figure 7 – I think you can label the panels a-e and specify that a-c are showing seasonal averages in the caption.
L469 - “as a deliverable for WP2.3 of ACSIS” I think this can be removed.
Figure 9 and Figure 11 – The text is too small and not readable at all.
Sections 3 and 4 - I am not fully qualified to review these sections but found them well written and clear with no obvious issues.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-405-RC2 -
AC1: 'Comment on essd-2023-405', Bablu Sinha, 27 Sep 2024
The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2023-405/essd-2023-405-AC1-supplement.pdf
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EC1: 'Comment on essd-2023-405', Baptiste Vandecrux, 03 Oct 2024
Dear authors,
Thank you for the detailed response to the reviewers' comments.
I would like to highlight two points raised by the reviewers that, based on your response, may not have been fully addressed.
Reviewer 1 stated "Section 5: I recommend deleting this entire section."
It seems that whether dispersed throughout the manuscript or centralized in a single section, this information disrupts the flow for readers. I recommend significantly shortening Section 5. Seven pages to describe previously published work is more suited to a review paper than a dataset description. You could condense this into a "Potential Synergy with Previously Published Work" section, where you list studies that can be used in combination with the presented data. This should remain at a high level, for example: "The data presented in Sections X and Y could be used in combination with simulations of aerosol from volcanic eruptions (Arfeuille et al., 2013; Luo, 2016...), also produced under the auspices of ACSIS." In this section, the data you presented in Sections 2 and 3 should be the focus, with auxiliary data mentioned only in terms of how they complement the main datasets. This section should not exceed 1.5-2 pages.
Reviewer 2 stated, "Section 2.3.1: The sector analysis is, in my opinion, too detailed."
Indeed, it is too detailed for a simple illustration of the dataset. Please focus on one of the two methods to define the open ocean. If you prefer, you can mention that an alternative approach using NAME was also investigated, yielding similar results. Consider removing Figure 4 if its primary purpose is to show the identification of ocean air masses from wind direction. Figure 4b and its accompanying description are not very conclusive and could also be removed. If you'd still like to include a plot of the O3 data, you could add it as a panel in Figure 5, aligned with the methane data. Please also update the plot to include the latest data (currently stopping at early 2021).
Finally, I recommend making all your plotting scripts available in a repository. This would enhance the reproducibility of your article and make it easier for readers to re-use the presented dataset.
Sincerely,
Baptiste VandecruxCitation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-405-EC1
Data sets
North Atlantic Climate System Integrated Study (ACSIS) Atlantic Ocean medium resolution SST dataset: Reconstructed 5-day, ½ degree, Atlantic Ocean SST (1950-2014). S. D. Williams and D. I. Berry https://dx.doi.org/10.5285/83b0cd7e7cc6495a90b4cb967ead3577
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