A Lagrangian study of the contribution of the Canary coastal upwelling to the nitrogen budget of the open North Atlantic

Hailegeorgis, Derara; Lachkar, Zouhair; Rieper, Christoph; Gruber, Nicolas

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-303-2021

Articles | Volume 18, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-303-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-303-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 18, issue 1

Research article

|

15 Jan 2021

Research article |

| 15 Jan 2021

A Lagrangian study of the contribution of the Canary coastal upwelling to the nitrogen budget of the open North Atlantic

Derara Hailegeorgis, Zouhair Lachkar, Christoph Rieper, and Nicolas Gruber

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Final revised paper (published on 15 Jan 2021)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 04 Feb 2020)
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Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of Hailegeorgis et al. paper', Anonymous Referee #1, 04 Mar 2020
- AC1: 'Answer to Referee 1', Zouhair Lachkar, 01 Jun 2020
RC2: 'Review: General and Specific comments', Anonymous Referee #2, 05 Mar 2020
- AC2: 'Answer to Referee 2', Zouhair Lachkar, 01 Jun 2020

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (14 Jun 2020) by Minhan Dai

AR by Zouhair Lachkar on behalf of the Authors (27 Jul 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (03 Aug 2020) by Minhan Dai

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (02 Sep 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The manuscript by Hailegeorgis et al. substantially improved from it's first version. The authors did a good validation of the ocean-biogeochemical model and wrote a nice discussion (section 8), which helps to contextualize better the work contribution. However, the paper still need some extra work. Specifically, the description of the model experiment and results still need clarification. This is highly relevant to capture the paper's take home messages. Besides, an additional effort should be done to improve the Introduction section, reducing wordiness and improving paragraph’s flow. I would recommend five well written paragraphs instead of seven. Specific comments are indicated below:

Page 5: The authors provided a scheme to explain better the experiments, but this scheme seems to me a little bit confusing. I am wondering why they defined those 3 modeling steps. I also wonder why the second step was called “qualitative”, although this step quantifies position, velocity, and tracer concentration. It may be helpful to state clearly the goal of each step in page 5. Besides, it could be helpful to explicitly link the steps with the results presented in sections 3-5. I suggest moving an improved experiment diagram to the paper main body.

Page 6: Suggestion: “Characteristic of upwelling” => “Upwelling patterns”

Page 9: Suggestion: “But the offshore distribution of the upwelling” => “But the upwelling zonal distribution”

Fig S22: Do these patterns represent the distribution of (1) upwelled particles at a given time, or (2) the locations where particles were upwelled above 70 m depth? Please clarify.

Page 10: Suggestion: “the median time for particles to traverse a given offshore distance interval” => “the median particle’s travel time for a given offshore interval”

Page 10: I am wondering what was the impact of islands in the offshore transport of water and nitrogen. This is an aspect that was not discussed in the paper.

Page 11, line 6: I’m lost, why is that coastal upwelling area the most sampled?

Page 14: Suggestion: “4.4 Structure of offshore transport” => “4.4 Vertical and horizontal structure”

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RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (07 Sep 2020)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (21 Sep 2020) by Minhan Dai

AR by Zouhair Lachkar on behalf of the Authors (14 Oct 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (28 Oct 2020) by Minhan Dai

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Short summary

Using a Lagrangian modeling approach, this study provides a quantitative analysis of water and nitrogen offshore transport in the Canary Current System. We investigate the timescales, reach and structure of offshore transport and demonstrate that the Canary upwelling is a key source of nutrients to the open North Atlantic Ocean. Our findings stress the need for improving the representation of the Canary system and other eastern boundary upwelling systems in global coarse-resolution models.