PCLM-D-25-00032

The IPCC Interactive Atlas DataLab: Online reusability for regional climate change assessment

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Gutiérrez,

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 Apr 04 2025 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.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

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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,

Terence Epule Epule

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

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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: N/A

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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: The paper provides an overview of a data analysis environment coupled with a data set underlying the IPCC Interactive Atlas. The objective of the setup is to facilitate the reproductibility of IPCC results. The paper is clear and well-written. My main criticisms of the paper is that it confines itself in a description of the work done, and provides little insight into what remains to be done, limitations of the existing setup and potential solutions to address those. I think the paper would be much stronger if it offered a perspective on the challenges faced at the interface between IPCC practices and technology, and a path forward.

22: Task Group on Data Support for Climate Change Assessments

23: First occurrence of WGI, spell it out

30: Not a native english speaker, but I don't understand what "to extend this effort to the remits of the Interactive Atlas" means

44: Maybe "culminating" is a bit self-serving

51: I suggest citing the DOI for the dataset.

61: Spell out ESGF on first occurrence

Table 1: The definition for hd is awkward, and the unit is not "energy". We typically use heating degree days for this, and this is also the name given in the IPCC report. Same idea for cd and cooling degree days. I suggest to simplify "near-surface (usually, 2 meters) air temperature" to just air temperature, and add those details in the caption.

Table 2: Add CORDEX to the header. I think this table would look better as a color-coded figure.

70: Not sure what "seamless" refers to here

72: Jupyter Labs -> JupyterLab. Note the citation in the References section is badly formatted, with Project Jupyter formatted as "Jupypter P."

86-88: Review syntax

100-103: long sentence, review syntax. Not sure "versioned" is the right term here.

103-106: I feel this is a bit misleading. Modern cloud-based services typically leverage data formats and access patterns optimized for object storage (e.g., S3 buckets and Zarr stores). The comparison below is between OPeNDAP access and a local HPC filesystem.

109: For the repo, I would recommend 1) publishing releases on Zenodo to get a DOI for the repo, 2) creating static documentation to look quickly at the notebooks.

112-118: At this point, I would assume most readers to be familiar with Github, and I believe this paragraph can be shrunk. Later, technologies such as conda and docker are mentioned without explanation, so it feels weird to explain what Github is.

122: I would use the term "badge" rather than "button".

137: use case examples -> use cases

141: Unclear what you mean by "streamlined workflow". Maybe an additional sentence would be helpful to explain why these two libraries were chosen.

145: IFCA has already been defined earlier (L 92)

151: General Parallel File System (GPFS)

192-193: Confusing, because chunking and compression are independent concepts. Also, I would avoid using "deflate", since it refers to a specific HTTP server option that won't be familiar to most readers, and in the end it's just ZLIB compression. I think the expression "compression over HTTP" is sufficient. I suggest to remove "deflate" from Figure 3 as well.

218: The "getting started" notebooks

273: The claim here is that the DataLab is designed to reproduce figures from AR6 and improve reproducibility. My understanding is that the data stored so far would cover figures from the Atlas chapter, but it's not clear to me how it would fare for other chapters, which often embed observations and model outputs not included in the Climate Impact Drivers stored here. Even for figures from the Atlas chapter, I'm wondering who would put in the time to create and publish those notebooks. I think my criticism here is that the discussion focusses on the technology that allows reproducibility, but says very little about the organization and the people required to make it happen.

296: I would like the "future work" section to be expanded. Testing for performance in other regions is important, but feels a bit thin. Please add concrete ideas about "potential optimizations". Also, please provide some "lessons learned" and advice to others interested in setting up a similar infrastructure.

313: The conclusion should address next steps. At the moment, with only two notebooks, this feels like a successful proof of concept. The conclusion should also discuss how the authors see the relation with the IPCC. Is there an ambition to use this "in real time" during AR7 to support the drafting process?

Fig 3: Discuss in the caption the transfer speed values over each bar. Error bars could be more visible, with horizontal lines on each end.

Fig 6: Capitalize y-axis label. Not sure if "member" is really the right term, because it's usually meant for realizations of the same model. The figure essentially displays different models, with different climate sensitivities. I don't expect the "ripf" identifier to be significant here.

Reviewer #2: This paper highlights the importance of open-source and open-data in understanding climate change and designing possible solutions.

The primary issue with this article is a lack of clarity regarding its main objective. While the title suggests that the focus is on something called DataLab, the abstract indicates that the scope is broader, covering not only a platform but also a standardised gridded dataset. However, following the introduction, the first section (2) discusses the Interactive Atlas dataset, and it is unclear if this refers to the harmonised gridded dataset mentioned in the abstract.

I would invite the authors to restructure a bit the first part of the paper, after the introduction, to clearly state what is the DataLab and why it's relevant. What can you do with it that you couldn't before. Without omitting the value of the notebooks shared in the repository. After this section, possibly written in plain language, you can then start explaining the technical details and showing some interesting examples.

Other two comments:

1. Spelling of "Datalab" is not always consistent, sometimes it is spelled with a capital "L".

2. The title uses the term "reusability”, but the paper does not discuss it a lot, if you want to keep it in the title I would invite to explain better its importance.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: David Huard

Reviewer #2: Yes: Matteo De Felice

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PCLM-D-25-00032R1

The IPCC Interactive Atlas DataLab: Online reusability for regional climate change assessment

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Gutiérrez,

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 Jun 01 2025 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.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

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,

Terence Epule Epule

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

Journal Requirements:

1. lease note that PLOS Climate has specific guidelines on code sharing for submissions in which author-generated code underpins the findings in the manuscript. In these cases, we expect all author-generated code to be made available without restrictions upon publication of the work. Please review our guidelines at https://journals.plos.org/climate/s/materials-software-and-code-sharing#loc-sharing-code and ensure that your code is shared in a way that follows best practice and facilitates reproducibility and reuse.

2. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

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

Reviewers' comments:

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

The IPCC Interactive Atlas DataLab: Online reusability for regional climate change assessment

PCLM-D-25-00032R2

Dear Gutiérrez,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'The IPCC Interactive Atlas DataLab: Online reusability for regional climate change assessment' 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,

Terence Epule Epule

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

The manuscript can now be accepted for publication as most of the queries raised have been addressed.

Reviewer Comments (if any, and for reference):