Proxy surrogate reconstructions for Europe and the estimation of their uncertainties

Bothe, Oliver; Zorita, Eduardo

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-16-341-2020

Articles | Volume 16, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-16-341-2020

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-16-341-2020

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

Articles | Volume 16, issue 1

Research article

|

18 Feb 2020

Research article |

| 18 Feb 2020

Proxy surrogate reconstructions for Europe and the estimation of their uncertainties

Oliver Bothe and Eduardo Zorita

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Final revised paper (published on 18 Feb 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 05 Jul 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Reviewer comment to Bothe and Zorita', Anonymous Referee #1, 01 Aug 2019
- AC1: 'Final Response to reviewers', Oliver Bothe, 08 Oct 2019
RC2: 'Review of “Proxy surrogate reconstruction for Europe and the estimation of their uncertainty” by Oliver Bothe and Eduardo Zorita', Anonymous Referee #2, 06 Aug 2019
- AC1: 'Final Response to reviewers', Oliver Bothe, 08 Oct 2019
RC3: 'Review of article: "Proxy surrogate reconstructions for Europe and the estimation of their uncertainties", by Oliver Bothe and Eduardo Zorita', Anonymous Referee #3, 23 Aug 2019
- AC1: 'Final Response to reviewers', Oliver Bothe, 08 Oct 2019

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (11 Oct 2019) by Jürg Luterbacher

AR by Oliver Bothe on behalf of the Authors (02 Dec 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (04 Dec 2019) by Jürg Luterbacher

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (16 Dec 2019)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (06 Jan 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Reviewer comments on “Proxy surrogate reconstructions for Europe and the estimation of their uncertainties” by Oliver Bothe and Eduardo Zorita

The manuscript addresses the important issue of the uncertainty estimation in analog-based climate reconstructions, a frequently used reconstruction methods in the recent past. Overall, the paper is well written and improved considerably from the original discussion paper. However, I would prefer a more condensed results section, which is still very extensive. It would be sufficient to focus more on common features and differences by comparing the approaches instead of explaining the same information for each approach repeatedly, e.g. naming the coldest, warmest decades for each approach again. Furthermore, the readability of some figures needs improvements (see below). Overall, I suggest publication after some minor corrections.

Page 4, line 15: Did you check if the standard deviations of the model simulation agree with observational data sets?

Page 5, line 6: I would not claim that mixed signals are the “most obvious” source of uncertainty, maybe better “one possible”.

Page 5, line 11: Not clear why MSE is mentioned here, too and not the only the standard variance definition.

Page 9, line 6: Can you explain how the Albanian and Slovakian proxy records can be in the PAGES2k data set if they do not explain temperature variability?
Additionally, if they do not contain a climate signal, I do not understand why you show them later in the paper as kind of independent validation/comparison?

Figure 2: very hard to read the figure, e.g. I cannot really see the grey envelope. Please consider other smoothing or colors.

Page 12, line 24: This was already explained in line 9 on page 11.

Page 13, line 10-19: This paragraph belongs in the methods section.

Figure 4, its caption and Fig. 5: Labels not consistent, sometimes 3-letter abbreviations with numbers and sometimes without numbers.

Figure 4 and page 16, line 10: Why are proxies without a climate signal included (see above)?

Page 16, line 11: This convergence rather gives us confidence in the method than in the understanding of past climate. The selection of input data and the multi-decadal to centennial variability contained in these proxies, probably influences on the reconstructions, too.

Figure 6: In my opinion, this figure is not really needed. Just reporting correlation coefficients would be sufficient.

Figure 7: The light grey ensemble range is not visible at all.

Figure 11: Why is the experiment with the fixed number of 39 analogs not included for comparison?

Page 25, line 4: typo in “available”

Page 27, line 19: Confusing that reconstructions are not made for the European domain only (but global?) and are now compared to Nuuk. This has never be mentioned and discussed before.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (06 Jan 2020) by Jürg Luterbacher

AR by Oliver Bothe on behalf of the Authors (10 Jan 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (21 Jan 2020) by Jürg Luterbacher

AR by Oliver Bothe on behalf of the Authors (22 Jan 2020) Manuscript

Short summary

One can use the similarity between sparse indirect observations of past climates and full fields of simulated climates to learn more about past climates. Here, we detail how one can compute uncertainty estimates for such reconstructions of past climates. This highlights the ambiguity of the reconstruction. We further show that such a reconstruction for European summer temperature agrees well with a more common approach.