New insights into the reconstructed temperature in Portugal over the last 400 years

Santos, J. A.; Carneiro, M. F.; Correia, A.; Alcoforado, M. J.; Zorita, E.; Gómez-Navarro, J. J.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-11-825-2015

Articles | Volume 11, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-11-825-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-11-825-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 11, issue 6

Research article

|

05 Jun 2015

Research article |

| 05 Jun 2015

New insights into the reconstructed temperature in Portugal over the last 400 years

J. A. Santos, M. F. Carneiro, A. Correia, M. J. Alcoforado, E. Zorita, and J. J. Gómez-Navarro

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Final revised paper (published on 05 Jun 2015)
Preprint (discussion started on 06 Jan 2015)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC C4: 'Interesting paper, but needs some revisions', Volker Rath, 08 Feb 2015
- AC C69: 'Reply to Reviewer Comment C4', João Andrade Santos, 08 Mar 2015
RC C9: 'Santos et al. review', Anonymous Referee #2, 09 Feb 2015
- AC C70: 'Reply to Reviewer Comment C9', João Andrade Santos, 08 Mar 2015

Peer-review completion

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

AR by João Andrade Santos on behalf of the Authors (09 Mar 2015) Author's response

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (18 Mar 2015) by Stefan Bronnimann

RR by Volker Rath (30 Mar 2015)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (22 Apr 2015)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The revised version of the paper is confusing, inconsistent and from different points of view not fully correct. The reader gets the following main interpretation of the research reading the paper: ‘we have a ‘bad’ reconstruction for Portugal, but perfect borehole and model data and need to readjust the reconstruction. This is definitively the wrong message that should be conveyed. Therefore I suggest rejecting the paper.
1. The authors argue to present a (new) correct low frequency temperature estimation for Portugal for the past 400 years without giving convincing reasons why this is necessary and for what purpose such a new estimate is needed.
2. The authors write in the text and answers to the reviewers that the Lutherbacher reconstructions has flaws in the low frequencies and thus need to be corrected. They don’t provide convincing evidence that this is the case and instead argue that the two simulations and boreholes are the adequate and correct data to perform such a correction. Unfortunately, the authors are not as critical with their data as they are with the reconstructions. The limitations of the RCMs for the area for instance are not reported and also not why the two simulations do not agree in different periods within the past 400 years and what implications this might have. Further, there is quite a large difference within the instrumental period between the observations and the two simulations (borehole data are not shown), thus also the SSA trend show a different sign as the observations for the 2nd part of the 20th century.
3. One striking feature is also that the borehole data are not plotted in Fig 2 b.
4. The main issues from the first review (see point 1) were not addressed. For instance the issue of the uncertainties of single reconstructions and (30 year averages) over Europe and Iberia in the Lutherbacher reconstruction.
5. From the SOM of Lutherbacher there it is mention, that Lisbon temperature data back to the mid 1850 are used in their reconstruction. It is thus hard to believe, that the reconstruction back to that time has any serious issues, also in terms of variability, trends.
6. Another issue is that the indexed temperature data from Portugal for the LMM were included in the reconstruction of Lutherbacher et al. (see their SOM). If they were to be ‘correct’ then also for that period it cannot be argued that the reconstruction has flaws and in my opinion it would be difficult to ‘beat’ the performance of that reconstruction for that period by any other reconstruction (method).
7. Page 11: The uncertainties in the CalT series are the combination of the original uncertainties in the Lut2004 dataset plus additional uncertainties related to the non-linear trend used in the adjustment. To my knowledge, the uncertainties for each grid point of the Luterbacher et al. data are not discussed in their publication I am also not aware that those would be accessible online. Uncertainties are given for the mean European reconstruction, therefore I cannot understand why the authors state differently and what kind of uncertainties they are using. For sure it is not correct to use the SSA filtering separately from Sim1 and Sim2. The author mix two different data set that cannot be combined/interchanged and thus this analysis is not correct. All subsequent analysis thus do not have merit to be presented as they are based on wrong assumptions. Further, as the authors state themselves, the estimated uncertainty is a lower bound, since it does not explicitly consider uncertainties related to the simulation itself, which are difficult to assess due to the limited number of available simulations with similar characteristics.
8. The authors mention that data are only available until the end of the 20th century. It is hard to believe that the authors do not have updated data from Lisbon going to 2014.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by Editor) (27 Apr 2015) by Stefan Bronnimann

AR by João Andrade Santos on behalf of the Authors (30 Apr 2015) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (15 May 2015) by Stefan Bronnimann

AR by João Andrade Santos on behalf of the Authors (15 May 2015) Manuscript