Lee wave detection over the Mediterranean Sea using the Advanced Infra-Red WAter Vapour Estimator (AIRWAVE) total column water vapour (TCWV) dataset

Papandrea, Enzo; Casadio, Stefano; Castelli, Elisa; Dinelli, Bianca Maria; Miglietta, Mario Marcello

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-6683-2019

Articles | Volume 12, issue 12

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-6683-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-6683-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 12, issue 12

Research article

|

18 Dec 2019

Research article |

| 18 Dec 2019

Lee wave detection over the Mediterranean Sea using the Advanced Infra-Red WAter Vapour Estimator (AIRWAVE) total column water vapour (TCWV) dataset

Enzo Papandrea, Stefano Casadio, Elisa Castelli, Bianca Maria Dinelli, and Mario Marcello Miglietta

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Final revised paper (published on 18 Dec 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 10 Apr 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'review paper amt 2019-105', Anonymous Referee #1, 09 May 2019
- AC1: 'Reply to reviewer 1', Enzo Papandrea, 01 Jul 2019
RC2: 'Review of manuscript amt-2019-105', Anonymous Referee #2, 16 May 2019
- AC2: 'Reply to reviewer 2', Enzo Papandrea, 01 Jul 2019

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Enzo Papandrea on behalf of the Authors (01 Jul 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (10 Jul 2019) by Marcos Portabella

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (25 Jul 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have addressed the concerns raised in my original review. I have a few follow-up comments, which I count as representing minor revisions, subject to which I recommend acceptance of the paper.
Page and line numbers below refer to the original manuscript, to match the original review comments and authors' response. Two other new comments are added at the end, referring to the latest manuscript.

p2 l25-34. So is this a deepening of the moist layer?

p5 l6-7. For clarity I'd insert "TCWV wave" between "no" and "occurrence" in this added sentence.

p5 l22. There are two relevant scale limits here, the grid size for aggregation, and the satellite resolution. As wavelength decreases below 8 satellite pixels, so that wave effects are increasingly not resolved, NTSD will decrease. As longer wavelengths approach the aggregation box used to calculate NTSD, NTSD will again decrease since only part of the wave is captured in the box (although it is not certain to me that this is occurring in Figure 2 as the authors suggest; wavelengths seem generally less than the aggregation box size). A simple statement that "shorter wavelengths ... generate larger standard deviations" is therefore not adequate. I think the authors just need to make a clear statement about these relevant scales and how they would affect the NTSD data. Of course if the aggregation box size is in fact impacting the NTSD value, it begs the question in the mind of the reader as to why a larger, or perhaps adaptive, grid box size was not used (although I appreciate that the method used is presented as a prototype).

Figures 2-5. I'm not really sure how using the vector thickness, which is hard to discern and only allows thresholds of 3, 6 and 9 to be perceived (with difficulty), is better than using the vector length, which would be obvious and is common practice (one example of, say, 6 or 9 m/s would suffice).

p9. l2-7. Have the authors considered making some comment in the manuscript regarding this? The exercise represents a crude analogue to a more rigorous Taylor-Goldstein approach (see e.g. Shutts, 1997,
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1350482797000340), whereby the wind and stability structure in the troposphere decides the resonant wavelength of the trapped wave. A vertical structure consideration is thus very relevant to the trapped wave wavelength likely to occur, while the orographic forcing length scale relates more to the amplitude.

p9. l17. It feels worth mentioning this future work idea in the manuscript, perhaps in relation to the
sentence starting 'We verified that the adopted method do not produce "false positive" detections...'?

New comments on latest manuscript:

p6 l13-15. Surely it is waves that propagate in the wave duct, not "shear"? "Wakes" also are controlled in a different way.

p3 l17. "root square mean" should be "root mean square".

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (05 Aug 2019) by Marcos Portabella

AR by Enzo Papandrea on behalf of the Authors (12 Sep 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (11 Oct 2019) by Marcos Portabella

AR by Enzo Papandrea on behalf of the Authors (17 Oct 2019)

Short summary

Lee waves have been detected in clear-sky conditions over the Mediterranean Sea using the total column water vapour (TCWV) fields. The products were generated applying the Advanced Infra-Red WAter Vapour Estimator (AIRWAVE) retrieval algorithm to the thermal infrared measurements of the Along Track Scanning Radiometer (ATSR) instrument series. A subset of the occurrences has been compared with both independent observations and model simulations.