PCLM-D-23-00144

Atmosphere and Ocean Energy Transport in Extreme Warming Scenarios

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Poletti,

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 submit your revised manuscript by Nov 23 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at climate@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pclm/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Ahmed Kenawy, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

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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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

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:

 In this study, authors evaluated the extended CMIP6 climate model simulations to study the energy transport in the Atmosphere and ocean in a warming scenarios. I appreciate the authors for their efforts. The manuscript is not properly organized and some sentences were hard to follow. Figures should be placed in the manuscript where titles were mentioned.

Specific Comments

1. Please use the text alignment justify

2. Introduction need to be improved. The authors need to discuss the literature survey of warming environment and their consequences.

3. The authors discussed the some methods and preliminary results in the introduction, they should be moved to the methods and results section.

4. Why the CO2 concentration is large among three models if scenario is same?

5. Authors, mentioned that relative humidity is decreasing over land region. Why RH is decreasing over land?

6. The authors should discuss the skill of these models in the historical period. The inherent model biases may effect the results.

Reviewer #2: 

This study focuses on the changes of Energy Transport and its underlying mechanisms in much warmer climate relative to the piControl state based on three CMIP6 models with different ECS. The topic is helpful and meaningful to understand the climate change. The authors analyzed the changes of basic climatological states, including surface temperature, surface humidity, net rainfall and atmospheric circulation, and of energy transports in the hot (2276-2300) period and intermediate (2076-2100) period relative to the piControl period, and discussed their underlying relationship and mechanism. However, some of the result analysis are hard to follow, hence I think that a major revision of this manuscript is needed before it can be considered for publication.

Major Comments

There are too many jumped descriptions, that is, when presenting the figure n, the authors inserted the Figs. n or n+1 contents and then continued back to present the Fig. n, in this manuscript, which increase the difficulty to understand. Hence the authors need to reorganize the logical relationship among the different paragraphs/figures. For example, I suggested the authors exchange the sequence of the Fig. 4 and Fig. 5, or the corresponding description paragraph. The section 3.2 first gives the MSE transport and then defines the MSE (before Fig. 16). Also, the authors need to arrange them according to the logical sequence.

Minor Comments

1. ECS means the equilibrium CS, generally larger than the TCS (Transient Climate Sensitivity). The authors need to note that the values in this manuscript resemble the TCS.

2. Fig. 2, the unit "C" better be "°C"

3. there are some wrong citations of the figure, e.g., "as indicated by the blue colors in Fig. 2c." should be Fig. 2g? and the next page "Arctic warming occurs by 2100 (Fig. 2c, f, i)" should be Figs. 2g, h, i??

4. there are some missing citations for the figures/tables, which make the readers difficult to read. For instance, the paragraph before the "Precipitation"section is better add Fig. 4 in the appropriate place. Again, adding the corresponding figure/table into the nearest paragraph before the 3.2 section.

5. Section d Atmospheric Circulation, The zonally-averaged streamfunction anomaly relative to ????? at 500hPa for...

6. the paragraph after Fig. 8, "The increased depth....." should be "The decreased depth.."???? as well as "the positive/negative anomaly" should reverse?

7. The Fig. 10 caption is not corresponding to the figure. (a,b,c) The evolution of .....location from 1850 to 2300?? and (d,e,f) The 30-year running mean....????

8.I am wondering the difference between the APRP SW CRE and the model outputted SW CRE? As for the model itself, the outputted SW CRE is the difference of the SW radiation at TOA between the clear sky and all sky conditions and the net CRE is the sum of LW CRE and SW CRE.

9. Fig. 11, the dashed red line should be solid red line.

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For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Atmosphere and Ocean Energy Transport in Extreme Warming Scenarios

PCLM-D-23-00144R1

Dear Poletti,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'Atmosphere and Ocean Energy Transport in Extreme Warming Scenarios' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Climate.

Before your manuscript can be formally accepted you will need to complete some formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow-up email from a member of our team. 

Please note that your manuscript will not be scheduled for publication until you have made the required changes, so a swift response is appreciated.

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

Best regards,

Ahmed Kenawy, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Reviewer Comments (if any, and for reference):

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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6. 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: I am satisfied with the responses provided by the authors

Reviewer #2: I have no other comments.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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