Modelling land–atmosphere daily exchanges of NO, NH<sub>3</sub>, and CO<sub>2</sub> in a semi-arid grazed ecosystem in Senegal

Delon, Claire; Galy-Lacaux, Corinne; Serça, Dominique; Personne, Erwan; Mougin, Eric; Adon, Marcellin; Le Dantec, Valérie; Loubet, Benjamin; Fensholt, Rasmus; Tagesson, Torbern

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-16-2049-2019

Articles | Volume 16, issue 9

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-16-2049-2019

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-16-2049-2019

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

Articles | Volume 16, issue 9

Research article

|

15 May 2019

Research article |

| 15 May 2019

Modelling land–atmosphere daily exchanges of NO, NH₃, and CO₂ in a semi-arid grazed ecosystem in Senegal

Claire Delon, Corinne Galy-Lacaux, Dominique Serça, Erwan Personne, Eric Mougin, Marcellin Adon, Valérie Le Dantec, Benjamin Loubet, Rasmus Fensholt, and Torbern Tagesson

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Final revised paper (published on 15 May 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 27 Aug 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Review of Delon et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 13 Jan 2019
- AC1: 'response to reviewer 1', Claire Delon, 03 Mar 2019
RC2: ''Modelling land atmosphere daily exchanges of NO, NH3, and CO2 in a semi-arid grazed ecosystem in Senegal' by C. Delon et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 28 Jan 2019
- AC2: 'response to reviewer 2', Claire Delon, 03 Mar 2019

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (13 Mar 2019) by Jens-Arne Subke

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (14 Mar 2019) by Jens-Arne Subke

AR by Claire Delon on behalf of the Authors (14 Mar 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (27 Mar 2019) by Jens-Arne Subke

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (06 Apr 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have done a good job in addressing the reviewers' comments. The manuscript has been considerably improved. Before final publication, please take the below listed comments into account:

Section on statistics is still a bit lacking. Apologies if I have been unclear in the initial review. The authors do not need to explain what a p-value is, but rather which hypotheses were tested, correlations between which variables (or 'variable groups', e.g. fluxes and meteorological drivers) were analyzed at which time scales, etc. Currently this section is just a slightly more detailed list of methods, but it is still not immediately clear what exactly these tools were used for without reading the results section first.

My major concern regarding the temporal scale has been addressed in an adequate manner with respect to the scope of this study. Personally, I am not 100 % convinced that modelling with monthly input data is enough to draw any conclusions on more than the average monthly flux, since the sub-monthly concentration gradient is being calculated from two variables with very different time-scales. However, these effects sometimes average out over a month, and may even do so over a day under specific conditions. Since this is impossible to test without parallel high-frequency measurements, I feel like the discussion and new literature references in section 4.1.1 are sufficient as a caveat for the reader regarding the interpretation of results.

The new flux partitioning with Zhang2010 is a welcome and interesting addition. Despite being only a small part of the manuscript, one can learn a lot about the uncertainties associated with model-based flux partitioning from this section.

Typesetting, units and tables are much better now, although math typesetting is still a little lackluster in some parts (e.g. unnecessary dots in Eq. (2), some missing subscripts (V_d vs Vd, Rglo vs R_glo, etc.), missing differentiation between variables (slanted) and descriptors (upright), etc.), but this can be fixed during the proofreading and final typesetting phase.

My other concerns have been addressed well by the authors and I think the manuscript should be accepted after some minor additions to the statistics section.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (17 Apr 2019)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (17 Apr 2019) by Jens-Arne Subke

AR by Claire Delon on behalf of the Authors (19 Apr 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (24 Apr 2019) by Jens-Arne Subke

AR by Claire Delon on behalf of the Authors (26 Apr 2019) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

In the Sahel region during the wet season, CO₂ and NO are released to the atmosphere, and NH3 is deposited on the soil. During the dry season, processes are strongly reduced. This paper shows the temporal variation in these soil–atmosphere exchanges of trace gases for 2 years, their sharp increase when the first rains fall onto dry soils, and how microbial processes are involved. We use a modelling approach, which is necessary when continuous measurements are not possible in remote regions.

Modelling land–atmosphere daily exchanges of NO, NH3, and CO2 in a semi-arid grazed ecosystem in Senegal

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Peer-review completion

Modelling land–atmosphere daily exchanges of NO, NH₃, and CO₂ in a semi-arid grazed ecosystem in Senegal