Decoupling of a Douglas fir canopy: a look into the subcanopy with continuous vertical temperature profiles

Schilperoort, Bart; Coenders-Gerrits, Miriam; Jiménez Rodríguez, César; van der Tol, Christiaan; van de Wiel, Bas; Savenije, Hubert

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-6423-2020

Articles | Volume 17, issue 24

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-6423-2020

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-6423-2020

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

Articles | Volume 17, issue 24

Research article

|

21 Dec 2020

Research article |

| 21 Dec 2020

Decoupling of a Douglas fir canopy: a look into the subcanopy with continuous vertical temperature profiles

Bart Schilperoort, Miriam Coenders-Gerrits, César Jiménez Rodríguez, Christiaan van der Tol, Bas van de Wiel, and Hubert Savenije

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Final revised paper (published on 21 Dec 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 24 Jun 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review report to “Decoupling of a Douglas fir canopy: a look into the subcanopy with continuous vertical temperature profiles” by Schilperoort et al. (2020)', Georg Jocher, 07 Jul 2020
- AC1: 'Reply to RC1', Bart Schilperoort, 26 Aug 2020
RC2: 'Review of "Decoupling of a Douglas fir canopy: a look into the subcanopy with continuous vertical temperature profiles" by Bart Schilperoort, Miriam Coenders-Gerrits, César Jiménez Rodrı́guez, Christiaan van der Tol, Bas van de Wiel, and Hubert Saveni', Anonymous Referee #2, 15 Jul 2020
- AC2: 'Reply to RC2', Bart Schilperoort, 26 Aug 2020
RC3: 'Review report to “Decoupling of a Douglas fir canopy: a look into the subcanopy with continuous vertical temperature profiles” by Schilperoort et al. (2020)', Anonymous Referee #3, 17 Jul 2020
- AC3: 'Reply to RC3', Bart Schilperoort, 26 Aug 2020

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (27 Aug 2020) by Paul Stoy

AR by Bart Schilperoort on behalf of the Authors (02 Oct 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (05 Oct 2020) by Paul Stoy

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (17 Oct 2020)

RR by Georg Jocher (29 Oct 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The manuscript entitled “Decoupling of a Douglas fir canopy: a look into the subcanopy with continuous vertical temperature profiles” by Schilperoort et al. improved substantially after the first revision round. However, there is still need for some clarifications and corrections, I would like to ask the authors to address the comments below before this manuscript can be published. Line numbers in my comments refer to the last manuscript version with tracked changes (file “bg-2020-216-author_response-version1.pdf”).

• Line 13: insert “to” so that is written there “…..and the canopy was able to cool down through…”
• Line 47: insert “above-canopy” so that is written there “…the interpretation of on-site above-canopy flux measurements…”
• Line 54: replace “determined” with “approached”; replace “has been so-called” with “is the so-called”.
• Line 54 and following: general comment to the u* filtering: it was not developed to approach decoupling, that was not the initial aim of this procedure. The initial aim was to ensure sufficient turbulence for EC measurements. Decoupling issues are then addressed by this automatically in some way, but not completely. Revise this section accordingly.
• Line 57: “…albeit with a higher value than a dynamic threshold would have.” What does this mean? Not fully clear, clarify.
• Line 59: delete one of the two “based on”.
• Line 71: I would remove the Foken (2017) reference here. They used cross correlation in a different context, citing Jocher et al. (2020) here is sufficient.
• Line 72: write “…an improved estimation of the fluxes above the canopy…
• Line 73: move the sentence “Usually, however, eddy covariance measurements are only available above the canopy.” to the end of the paragraph.
• Line 89: I wonder if it would be possible to name at the end of the introduction a couple of specific objectives of this study which are addressed then later in the manuscript. And close the introduction with the overall aim of the study.
• Line 119: delete the second “and”. Two times section in this line. Other expression for the second one? Like part?
• Line 125-130: again I am wondering why you are naming this all here if it is not used in the further course of the study. I would only introduce what is actually used in your work.
• Line 160 (and other places in the manuscript): write in past tense when you describe what you did in the past. Tenses are somehow mixed here…
• Lines 158-163: so that means in reality you were filtering the data according their potential error, discarding all data above a certain threshold? Name this explicitly.
• Line 170: No, only Flag 0 values are best quality data. Flags 0 and 1 are good enough for general analysis, but not best quality. Revise this.
• Lines 174-183: delete what you not specifically use in the study.
• Line 204: reformulate in “…..diverged and consequently decoupling was assumed.”
• Line 223: “…..was ~0.1 K for the main profile…”
• Line 242: delete “due to radiative cooling.” at the end of the sentence.
• Line 250: how are seasons defined?
• Line 272: delete the last sentence.
• Line 303: “Interestingly,…”; “…with a kind of threshold value…”
• Line 305: reformulate: “This threshold value is in line with…”
• Lines 354-364: this section says actually, that it is only the intensity of wind shear which dominates the coupling/decoupling behaviour. Is it this what you want to say? So why should we care about T profiles?
• Line 365: “which is in line with previous research”
• Line 373: to the drainage flows; this was not found by Alekseychik et al., this knowledge exists already longer. Choose another reference maybe. Or reformulate:” Amongst others, Alekseychik et al. proved…..”
• Line 378: add reference Jocher et al. (2017) to the Staebler and Fitzjarrald reference.
• Line 400: “…response which could show…”
• Line 406: revise text in “…to improve the representativeness of flux measurements above the forest.”
• Line 407: there was a lot of talking about decoupling now, very interesting. But unfortunately you almost don`t touch at all the implications of decoupling. Why would we be interested to know about decoupling? What can happen with the above canopy EC fluxes if decoupling occurs? 1-2 sentences to this would be great.
• Line 576: “…would be constant over the height…”
• Line 595: “…gradients were calculated…”
• Line 605: why are you substracting here the upper from the lower temperature? For the T profiles you do it the other way around, right?
• Line 608: replace “has” with “had”.
• Lines 609/610: if there is heterogeneity, then it is always there, not only during stable conditions. revise this sentence.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (30 Oct 2020) by Paul Stoy

AR by Bart Schilperoort on behalf of the Authors (12 Nov 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (15 Nov 2020) by Paul Stoy

AR by Bart Schilperoort on behalf of the Authors (16 Nov 2020)

Short summary

With distributed temperature sensing (DTS) we measured a vertical temperature profile in a forest, from the forest floor to above the treetops. Using this temperature profile we can see which parts of the forest canopy are colder (thus more dense) or warmer (and less dense) and study the effect this has on the suppression of turbulent mixing. This can be used to improve our knowledge of the interaction between the atmosphere and forests and improve carbon dioxide flux measurements over forests.