Climatic traits on daily clearness and cloudiness indices

Muñoz, Estefanía; Ochoa, Andrés

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-573-2021

Articles | Volume 18, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-573-2021

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-573-2021

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

Articles | Volume 18, issue 2

Research article

|

26 Jan 2021

Research article |

| 26 Jan 2021

Climatic traits on daily clearness and cloudiness indices

Estefanía Muñoz and Andrés Ochoa

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Final revised paper (published on 26 Jan 2021)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 26 Mar 2020)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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SC1: 'Errata: page 12 line 9.', Andrés Ochoa, 24 Apr 2020
RC1: 'review of bg-2020-31', Anonymous Referee #2, 04 Jun 2020
- AC2: 'Response Anonymous Referee #2', Estefanía Muñoz, 27 Jun 2020
RC2: 'Referee comment', Anonymous Referee #3, 05 Jun 2020
- AC3: 'Response Anonymous Referee #3', Estefanía Muñoz, 27 Jun 2020

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (10 Aug 2020) by Paul Stoy

AR by Katja Gänger on behalf of the Authors (27 Oct 2020) Author's response

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (27 Oct 2020) by Paul Stoy

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (24 Nov 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Muñoz and Ochoa explore the probability distribution functions of clearness indices for shortwave radiation (including photosynthetically-active radiation) across the globe. I appreciate the comprehensive revision. The revised manuscript is a marked improvement and the authors deserve credit for a great deal of good work. There are still a number of items that require attention before I can recommend the manuscript be submitted, but on the measure these comments are largely minor.

Abstract: it would still help (me at least) to define in the abstract if hourly (or half-hourly) or daily PAR and SW values are used in the analysis to help communicate what is being displayed in the PDF.

Rodriguez-Iturbe and colleagues do great research; this is true. But the text as written focuses on their research instead of yours and how your work pushes forward stochastic analysis in Earth science. Also, as a consequence, the importance of your work is subsumed by the work of others. It’s interesting for a number of applications including for example solar power forecasting to understand the stochastic nature of atmospheric attenuation of radiation. The purpose of the present paper is to explain how this (partly) random process differs across the globe. Focusing on this novelty would improve the Introduction.

Note a few minor typos like the lines above equation 2.

p. 6: define doy as day of year.

I recommend a proofread before final submission to catch things like ‘more sensitive to the tails KS’ (should be ‘tails of KS’), and ‘WS’ in the conclusions, etc.

Figure 5 and 6 is convincing, but a formal categorization analysis of the different pdf types would be a bit more robust. The data do seem to sort nicely with some interesting outliers.

Instead of ‘neater than’ it may be better-written ‘arguably more effective at classifying sites based on their solar radiation characteristics’.

DE-Geb, and DE-Hai are very close to each other, I am curious to know the mechanism by which dry days still have bimodal distributions? Is fog an issue?

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (24 Nov 2020) by Paul Stoy

AR by Estefanía Muñoz on behalf of the Authors (08 Dec 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (09 Dec 2020) by Paul Stoy

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Short summary

We inspect for climatic traits in the shape of the PDF of the clear-day (c) and the clearness (k) indices at 37 FLUXNET sites for the SW and the PAR spectral bands. We identified three types of PDF, unimodal with low dispersion, unimodal with high dispersion and bimodal, with no difference in the PDF type between c and k at each site. We found that latitude, global climate zone and Köppen climate type have a weak relation and the Holdridge life zone a stronger relation with c and k PDF types.