Homogeneity criteria from AVHRR information within IASI pixels in a numerical weather prediction context

Farouk, Imane; Fourrié, Nadia; Guidard, Vincent

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-3001-2019

Articles | Volume 12, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-3001-2019

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-3001-2019

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

Articles | Volume 12, issue 6

Research article

|

03 Jun 2019

Research article |

| 03 Jun 2019

Homogeneity criteria from AVHRR information within IASI pixels in a numerical weather prediction context

Imane Farouk, Nadia Fourrié, and Vincent Guidard

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Final revised paper (published on 03 Jun 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 19 Nov 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #1, 12 Dec 2018
- AC1: 'Reply to comment of reviewer 1', Nadia Fourrié, 06 Mar 2019
RC2: 'Review of Farouk et al “Homogeneity criteria within IASI pixels for the preparation of an all-sky assimilation', Anonymous Referee #2, 17 Dec 2018
- AC2: 'reply to referee 2', Nadia Fourrié, 06 Mar 2019

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Nadia Fourrié on behalf of the Authors (06 Mar 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (07 Mar 2019) by Brian Kahn

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (02 Apr 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The manuscript has been significantly improved. The work now makes sense and follows a logical structure, with reasonable support for the conclusions. There is only one main issue (the quality of English) which is not the responsibility of the scientific reviewers. Assuming this will be dealt with, if a few other minor changes can be addressed the manuscript will be acceptable for publication.

Main

The quality of English needs improving, particularly in the first few sections, either by the authors or by copy editing. Some examples are listed below but there are many more.

Minor

P3 L10 - “Intuitively, collocated AVHRR data provide information on surface properties…” Please remove “Intuitively” since the following statements are unarguable.

P3 L18 - Sentence including “background equivalents to AROME fields” does not really make sense. Background AROME fields are being used to simulate cloud-affected equivalents to the observations.

P9 L 11 - Section title “Background departure check” is not an accurate description here: it is a comparison of standard deviations, not O-B.

P11 L29-31 - “we decided to select … less than 0.8%” - why specifically 0.8%? Please explain in the text a little more, as it is still not entirely obvious why here.

Table 3 columns 3 and 4 could be swapped for consistency with table 2.

Section 5.1: please recap exactly how IASI observations are used in the control and in the experiment as it is still not clear (covering the McNally and Watts and the new test and anything else important) To understand Fig. 6, we also need to know if there is a channel set for which the homogeneity criteria are not applied, due to the lack of influence of clouds on these channels.

P20 L29 -“results show” -> “results suggest” since the results from section 5 do not directly address the question of whether cloudy observations are better filtered, although clearly the reduction in IASI FG departure std. dev. could have been caused by this.

P20 L 31 - “3% of all observations are rejected” needs more context - what percentage of all IASI observations are kept in the control and in the experiment? Please add the required results to section 5 if these are not already present.

P21 L1 - “neutral impact” - actually Figs. 8a and 9 mainly suggest improvements to short range forecasts, which is worth mentioning. But what about longer range forecasts, please could you say something on this.

Typos

P4 L7 - “according a following terrain” -> “with a terrain-following”

P4 L18 - “divervence”

P4 L31 - “allows to simulate” -> “allows simulation of”

P6 L16 - “are found for example for the” - rewrite

P8 L12 - “A IASI” -> “An IASI”

P8 L19 - “The first two ones” - remove “ones” here and later in the same sentence.

P8 L 27 - “determined by C_j WHICH is the cluster fraction”

P9 L1 - “calculed” -> “calculated”

P10 L3 - “If a IASI pixel do not” - use “an”, “does”

P9 L9 - “The distance of each cluster ..” is not a full sentence as lacking a verb

P20 L16 - “bakcground”

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (04 Apr 2019) by Brian Kahn

AR by Nadia Fourrié on behalf of the Authors (23 Apr 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (25 Apr 2019) by Brian Kahn

Short summary

A selection for homogeneous scenes for the assimilation of IASI radiances is proposed by using information on the collocated imager pixels inside each infrared observation. A revised method for the selection, which represents a compromise between two methods to select homogeneous scenes using homogeneity criteria already proposed in the literature, has a positive impact on the observation minus the simulation statistics. It has been tested in a numerical weather prediction model for clear sky.