Analyzing Atmospheric Circulation Patterns Using Mass Fluxes Calculated from Weather Balloon Measurements: North Atlantic Region as a Case Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The new version of the manuscript has significantly improved the Quality of Presentation and the Interest to the Readers. However, I still strongly recommend exclude parts of the manuscript which is not directly related to the case study. It will help to raise the Significance of Content and Scientific Soundness. The Introduction the case stud results (only 5 years and 5 stations) cannot answer and describe the changes and repeatability of the global circulation patterns (even in the Atlantic Region). Actually, the Conclusions and recommendations follows this rule, that the case study with suggestion methodology and usage of weather balloons have perspectives, but the presented results are not capable to answer all the emerging questions. So, my suggestion is still open: sometimes the less makes bigger effect on the public, than putting in the manuscript everything you know.

The authors do not make any changes in figures. However, if the main idea of the manuscript is to analyze global atmospheric circulation, I strongly recommend NOT to analyze the air movements on a ground surface and at boundary layer, because three are a lot of noises including roughness, thermal convectively, etc.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1,

We thank you for your encouragement and constructive suggestions on the new version.

1. On the suggestion to exclude parts of the manuscript

We definitely appreciate and understand your suggestion about excluding the parts of the manuscript which are not directly related to the case study, i.e., the general background on atmospheric circulation patterns. However, as we said in our previous response, we feel that this discussion is necessary since we were unable to find a suitable reference that comprehensively described this important historical background of how the current understanding of “atmospheric circulations” arose. And we still believe that it is important for the scientific community to have an understanding of this background, especially since many of the debates from the mid-20^th century remain relevant today, yet appear to have been largely forgotten or else incorrectly dismissed as “resolved” by the community.

You are correct that the case study in itself nominally covers too small a geographical area and time period to truly resolve these longer debates. However, our hope is that this case study will encourage researchers to apply our techniques to other regions and time periods for which such a background is essential – and does not appear to be available elsewhere.

Moreover, we believe that an awareness of the broader problems in our current understanding of atmospheric circulations which we described in the background will be an important motivation for encouraging researchers to apply our techniques. Therefore, we think that this detailed background is essential reading for researchers interested in our techniques as well as our case study.

That said, we have taken your suggestion on board, and revised the manuscript by adding a clarifying discussion in the beginning of the introduction just before Section 1.1:

“…In this paper, we present a new set of techniques which can be applied to the data from weather balloon soundings (sometimes called “radiosondes”) such as NOAA NCEI’s Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA) [3–5], as well as to other equivalent atmospheric profile samplings. These techniques allow us to directly calculate the horizontal mass fluxes at all points sampled by the weather balloons. In this manuscript we will apply these techniques to five years of data (2015-2019) for five stations sampled from a fairly constant meridian in the North Atlantic sector as a case study to demonstrate the utility of these calculations.

Even though this case study represents a relatively small geographical region and a relatively short period, we already find that our analysis provides several new insights which have implications for current understanding of atmospheric circulations. However, ultimately, we hope that our case study will encourage the extension of these new tech-niques to analyse more stations, more regions and more time periods.

We believe that this will provide much deeper insights into atmospheric circulation patterns, and hopefully finally allow us to gain a deeper understanding of the general atmospheric circulation. Therefore, before we turn to these new techniques and our case study, we will first provide an introductory review of the current views on atmospheric circulations and how they arose.

…”

2. On the discussion of the ground level results in Figures 4 and 5

We take your point about how the ground level results are distinct from those in the free atmosphere and less relevant to an analysis of atmospheric circulation. However, we think that it is important for the reader to be aware that these results can be very different from those in the free atmosphere.

Therefore, we have revised the manuscript in response to your recommendation by adding the following statements to the discussion of Figures 4 and 5 (at lines 539-543 in the revised manuscript):

“Since the main focus of this manuscript is to analyze atmospheric circulation patterns, we do not discuss the results for the ground level in much further detail. We merely draw attention to the fact that the observed trends at the ground level can be substantially different from the trends within the free atmosphere. Some of the differences in behavior may be due to surface roughness, turbulence, etc. However, above the boundary layer, the variability in both meridional (Figure 4) and zonal (Figure 5) fluxes is remarkably cohesive.”

Again, we would like to thank you for your constructive comments on both this round of reviews and the previous one. We think our revisions in response to your latest review have improved the manuscript even further.

We have included a note in our acknowledgements thanking you (as well as the editor and the other reviewer) for your feedback.

 

Reviewer 2 Report

General Comments:

Thank you very much again to take into account and to appreciate my review and comments! I see that the authors took into account all of them! Thanks!

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 2,

Thank you for your encouraging comments and feedback. We have included a note in our acknowledgements thanking you (as well as the editor and the other reviewer) for your feedback.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

REVISION MANUSCRIPT Atmosphere- 1381582:

“Analyzing atmospheric circulation patterns using mass fluxes calculated from weather balloon measurements: North Atlantic region as a case study”

General comments:

The authors employed a new useful empirical tool for analyzing atmospheric circulations based on simple calculations and using data from five weather balloon radiosonde stations to provide a vertical profile of the horizontal atmospheric mass fluxes. They argue that the results are inconsistent and partially consistent with respect to other circulation cells. Therefore, I found the research interesting. However, some suggestions and revisions need to be applied in order to consider for publication.

Specific comments:

Introduction: I found the Introduction too large; it should be possible to summarize the most relevant part of the state-of-art in maximum two pages.

Section 2.1: Figures 1 and 2 are far away from their respective first mention. I recommend placing or moving the figures to fit better into the text.

Line 312: The authors repeat a sentence from the line 280. It should be enough to include the corresponding citation instead of repeating their contribution.

Reviewer 2 Report

The main idea of the research – too increase the usage of weather balloons – contradicts with real situation, because weather balloons data are very much used in reanalysis and GCM (CMIP6 project).  https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/focus/2020/fact-sheet-reanalysis; https://hal-insu.archives-ouvertes.fr/insu-01527457/document; https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/12/2139/2019/gmd-12-2139-2019.pdf; https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020EA001281.

The authors give very broad and detailed historical perspective of balloons usage and atmospheric circulation schemes (which could be a good material for handbook). However, the manuscript lacks recent findings and connections with balloon data applicability (atmosphere interconnections are touched in Introduction, but there is no development of the idea and no evidential results). The idea of increasing number of the balloons is not supported, recently the world is going more and more on remote data usage. It is likely that zonal and meridional wind fields and air circulations belongs to remote research as well. It is not even mentioned in the manuscript. https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/11/4545/2018/amt-11-4545-2018.pdf; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66541-5.

The idea that the changes of fluctuations of atmospheric schemes could be determined by climatic changes is not included in Results and Discussion part.  

The usage of 5 station and 5 years (and making the averages of numbers) could not show any changes, because the period is too short and it could be the result of natural sounding of the atmosphere. How is possible to derive ‘a quasi-annual periodicity of 0.96 years’ (almost a year) from dataset of 5-years? The question is opened because of lack sufficient methodological and literature based background.

The last section of the research (3.3. Preliminary frequency analysis of the time series) is not supported with other references and findings (except the works from the same authors of a manuscript).

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf