PCLM-D-23-00059

Crowdsourcing air temperature data for the evaluation of the urban microscale model PALM – a case study in central Europe

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. van der Linden,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please address all of the comments by both reviewers, in particular, by expanding the discussions around : higher spatial differences of CWS and the difference between the model and observations in the first couple of hours in the comparison with the NETATMO stations. 

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Rohinton Emmanuel

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

Please pay special attention to both reviewers' substantive comments. Although the decision is 'Minor Revisions' there are areas of improvement suggested by both reviewers and this could be addressed by expanding the 'Discussions' section

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Well written paper about a comparison of measurements and a model. Especially the description of the Palm Model is well done (as it's quite complex). The differences of the two sources of temperature regarding the min. and max. are astonishingly small.

Only a few minor comments:

- line 18: it's not "Just" the public health which is impacted, but the (human) health (on the individual level).

- line 157: non-ventilated measurements show quite important differences; this should be at least mentioned (e.g. Gubler, et al., 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.uclim.2021.100817

- line 245: explain RANS

- lines 375 ff: soil moisture is for sure an important source of the differences. During such heat waves very often the soils are dry (otherwise such high temperatures wouldn't happen). CWS are places near buildings mostly on walls - also not over open ground (with possible sources of moisture)

- line 440: higher spatial differences of CWS (also further down - eg. line 511): this makes sense as they are fixed on very different facades (orientation, shadow) and even height above the ground. I suggest to add some words regarding this as heigth above the ground has an big effect on the daily curve.

- i would be interested about spatial differences: are sites in the city centre different than outside the city centre? This has been handled to some extent by averaging the two nesting areas. Doing this by different types of urbanisation would be interesting.

Reviewer #2: The paper looks generally fine to me. I have a couple of small issues:

1. in the QC procedure, the third step talks about "flagging" stations. It is not completely clear, does that mean flagging as False or missing?

2. Figures included in the manuscript have a low quality, maybe they are just too compressed in the preview, but either way, I'd recommend checking that

3. In the text, you specify time as e.g. 16:00 UTC, in the figures and captions is 14:00 h. Is that now in local time? Please make this consistent.

4. Is the black box in the PALM maps the child domain? I believe so, but it would be nice to have this information in the figure captions

5. l. 365: You conjecture that the difference between the model and observations in the first couple of hours could be caused by the spin-up. That would be my first guess too, but I'm wondering why the effect is not similar in the comparison with the NETATMO stations, where for a lot of them the model actually agrees well with the stations in the beginning and has larger error in the end of the simulation. I think this needs more discussion.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Jan Remund

Reviewer #2: No

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Crowdsourcing air temperature data for the evaluation of the urban microscale model PALM – a case study in central Europe

PCLM-D-23-00059R1

Dear Ms van der Linden,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'Crowdsourcing air temperature data for the evaluation of the urban microscale model PALM – a case study in central Europe' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Climate.

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Thank you again for supporting Open Access publishing; we are looking forward to publishing your work in PLOS Climate.

Best regards,

Rohinton Emmanuel

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Reviewer Comments (if any, and for reference):