PCLM-D-25-00319

Added value of a priori bias correcting dynamically

downscaled data for application to species distribution models - a case study for coastal British Columbia

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Hingmire,

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.

As you will see, the reviews are quite contrasted in their recommendation (reject / minor revision). However, these reviews are both excellent, in my view, as they suggest clear ways to improve your manuscript. Quite importantly, both reviews mentioned unclear aspect of the methodology or scope of the work that need to be addressed. I would like to give you the opportunity to address those concerns and invite you to re-submit your manuscript after a somewhat major revision.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Nov 28 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,

Frédéric Cyr

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Upon revision, I would recommend that you not just answer the reviewers' comment, but also that you pay specific attention to the reproducibility of your work, which is an essential publication criterion for PLOS Climate.

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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: Partly

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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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: This study explores the added value of bias correcting a priori before dynamically downscaling output from an Earth System Model. The AV calculations are conducted compared to downscaling without bias correcting, using a suite of BIOCLIM indicators, mostly related to atmospheric temperature and precipitation. The authors suggest that the a priori bias correction can help provide more accurate results for species distribution models (SDMs). Overall, I think this study is interesting and the methodology is clearly outlined. I think that the results are useful for the modeling community, though I am a little confused on the underlying motivation and broader context of the results as the study presents them.

The study uses an atmospheric model (WRF) for the downscaling and compares a suite of atmospheric variables to an atmospheric reanalysis product. But, the primary region of study is over the ocean, and the results are introduced and motivated as being beneficial to SDMs. Judging from the literature cited and the BIOCLIM indices used, this appears to be terrestrial SDMs (though this is never directly stated), so then why are the AV scores only calculated over the ocean? Everything in this manuscript appears to be focused on the atmosphere, yet the results are highlighted over the ocean. Marine-based SDMs will utilize entirely different indices/variables than the BIOCLIM indices used here (e.g. SST, MLD, u,v water transport), so the comparison presented will not directly translate to marine SDMs. The ocean is ultimately forced by the atmosphere, so to first order we would expect that improving the representation of atmospheric temperature will increase the accuracy of ocean temperature. If this is the connection that the authors are hoping to make, then I suggest they state this more clearly. But even so, this is not always the case as ocean mixing parameterizations and representation within an ocean model also has a substantial impact. Thus, to really get at the improvement for marine SDMs, the authors would need to show how the bias corrected atmospheric forcing generated here, yields more accurate simulation of ocean indices used in SDMs from an ocean model.

I don’t think the title accurately represents the work presented here, as is implies that the study uses an SDM, or makes a direct connection to a particular SDM, neither of which is what this study is presenting. Rather, the title should highlight that the bias correcting improves simulation of the BIOCLIM environmental indices.

I’m wondering if the authors could also calculate the AV scores for just the dynamical downscaling (i.e. WRF_CESM2 compared to CESM2). Everything is calculated for the next step (WRF_CESM2_BC and WRF_CESM2) but it looks like the downscaling itself also provides a substantial improvement, especially over land. I think this would be helpful to present since dynamical downscaling is a computationally intensive endeavor, so it is useful to present the benefit provided by this technique. Further, not every variable/application will have a sufficiently resolved observational reanalysis product to accurately conduct an a priori bias correction like what was done here.

Lines 154-158: It appears that the model is not quite capturing the extremes on either end? If so, suggest a short sentence summarizing this.

Line 287: In addition to some of the other downscaling techniques the authors already mentioned, there is also a “time-varying delta” approach which seeks to maintain the high-resolution variability (e.g. Pozo Buil et al., 2021 https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.612874).

Reviewer #2: This manuscript compares two sets of dynamically-downscaled data: one with a priori bias correction and the one without, for their use in species distribution models (SDMs). The comparison uses downscaled ERA5 data as a reference, and focuses on bioclimatic variables and climate extreme indices. In a case study for coastal British Columbia, the authors show that a priori bias correction has improvement for ecologically relevant variables, compared to the non-bias-correction case. Below are my specific comments.

1. This manuscript evaluates downscaled data that will be used for species distribution models (SDMs). Another important aspect central to SDMs and closely related to downscaling, is the spatial scale at which an SDM is fitted. I would discuss the scope of your study in terms of spatial scale and perhaps acknowledge any potential limitations.

2. The Bias Correction Method section requires more details for reproducibility. It is not clear how equations (1) - (4) were implemented, especially given that the CESM2 and ERA5 data have different spatial resolutions.

3. It is not quite accurate to describe sign AV (sAV) as a measure of variability. Both the normalized AV (naV) and sAV assess the mean: nAV evaluates the overall mean, while sAV evaluates mean at the grid-cell level. To measure variability, for example, one could downscale multiple ensemble members, compute nAV for each ensemble member, and then calculate the standard deviation of all nAV values.

4. My main concern is that the WRF_ERA5 data were not evaluated at the same spatial resolution used to compare WRF_CESM2 and WRF_CESM2_BC. Instead, WRF_ERA5 data were further downscaled using bilinear interpolation to a finer resolution. If I understand correctly, the station observations are available at point level, so there is inherently a resolution mismatch between the interpolated data and the station data. Would it be possible to aggregate the station data to the same resolution as the WRF_ERA5 data and then compare the WRF_ERA5 data to the aggregated data?

5. I would add a table that summarizes the spatial resolution of each data (e.g., CESM2, ERA5), the number of grid cells, and the corresponding computation time, at least for the case-study region considered.

6. In general, researchers using SDMs should be more interested in the sAV results, as sAV offers more information on how the downscaled data perform spatially, which will in turn inform how species distribution changes across space. However, in both Figures 5 and 6, the sAV results are much more heterogeneous than the nAV results. Moreover, in equation (6), the threshold is set to zero, which somewhat favors WRF_CESM2_BC. Have you considered different thresholds, for example, D − D_BC > 2?

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6. 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.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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While revising your submission, we strongly recommend that you use PLOS’s NAAS tool (https://ngplosjournals.pagemajik.ai/artanalysis) to test your figure files. NAAS can convert your figure files to the TIFF file type and meet basic requirements (such as print size, resolution), or provide you with a report on issues that do not meet our requirements and that NAAS cannot fix.

After uploading your figures to PLOS’s NAAS tool - https://ngplosjournals.pagemajik.ai/artanalysis, NAAS will process the files provided and display the results in the "Uploaded Files" section of the page as the processing is complete. If the uploaded figures meet our requirements (or NAAS is able to fix the files to meet our requirements), the figure will be marked as "fixed" above. If NAAS is unable to fix the files, a red "failed" label will appear above. When NAAS has confirmed that the figure files meet our requirements, please download the file via the download option, and include these NAAS processed figure files when submitting your revised manuscript.

PCLM-D-25-00319R1

Added value of a priori bias correction for dynamical downscaling - A case study of BIOCLIM indices for coastal

British Columbia

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Hingmire,

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 Feb 12 2026 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 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,

Frédéric Cyr

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

Journal Requirements:

If the reviewer comments include a recommendation to cite specific previously published works, please review and evaluate these publications to determine whether they are relevant and should be cited. There is no requirement to cite these works unless the editor has indicated otherwise.

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):

Thank you for your revised manuscript. There are minor points raised by one of the reviewer. I would like to give you the opportunity to modify your manuscript to answer those concerns. I will be happy to accept it afterwards.

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Reviewers' comments:

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: (No Response)

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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

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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: No

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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

**********

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: The authors have addressed my previous comments, and I think this has greatly helped clarify and improve the manuscript. I appreciate the clarity regarding the underlying motivation behind this manuscript and the change in focus from marine to coastal SDMs. Further, the additional analysis highlighting the utility of just the downscaling prior to the bias correction is a noteworthy result that I think improves the impact of the study. I have just a couple additional comments, more of an editorial nature, that I have provided below. Overall, I think this manuscript is ready for publication.

I appreciate the additional analysis and text provided by the authors regarding the improvement generated by the downscaling prior to the bias correction. In the added discussion text (lines 347-354), I would recommend also highlighting the benefit for users concerning this result. As mentioned in my previous review, while the bias correction does provide added benefit, it also requires observational data of a sufficient temporal-resolution. Thus, this analysis highlights that downscaling can still provide added benefit for environmental applications when the bias correcting is not possible. Further, this study is quantifying the skill improvement with the downscaling, which is a step that is commonly skipped with downscaling studies.

I think the title is now more descriptive of the study, but just want to note that I don’t think the authors have to specifically use the term BIOCLIM within the title, and could choose to be more general.

Reviewer #2: The authors have addressed most of my concerns raised for the initial manuscript. Please see below my specific comments on the revised manuscript. These comments primarily aim to improve clarity for ecologists, whom I assume are among the target audiences of this work.

1. My main concern about setting c = 0 for D − D_BC > c is that setting c = 0 treats a large difference (e.g., D − D_BC = 2) and a very small difference (e.g., D − D_BC = 0.001) as the same level of improvement. The latter could possibly arise due to different factors such as numeral precision and earlier preprocessing steps. It would be helpful to at least discuss the potential sensitivity of the normalised AV results to the choice of c in the Discussion section. Regarding your response, is it necessary to use a common c for all variables, or could c be variable specific?

2. I could not find how the interannual standard deviation was computed. Please add a formula and/or a short description of the computation if I am not missing something.

3. In the section of ‘Calculation of added value’, it would help to include more description, for example, a definition of added value and guidance to interpret the two added-value metrics. Are these metrics smaller is better or larger is better? These may not be obvious to some readers.

4. I appreciate the authors adding the description about computation (“These WRF experiments took approximately 28 hours to run each simulation year using 80 computation cores on the Niagara computing cluster provided by Digital Research Alliance of Canada.”). It would be clearer with a bit more detail. For example, what is the size of the spatial domain; does the 28 hours refer to one experiment or all experiments; does 80 cores refer to CPUs; and was parallel computing used? This would help ecologists estimate the expected computation time for their own study regions if they are interested in your approach.

5. The first author name for Fortini et al. in the references does not match ‘Fortini et al.’ in the text. Please double-check all the references.

6. The links to the data in the Data and methods section link to error pages. Please check and update the links.

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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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[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.]

Figure Resubmissions:

While revising your submission, we strongly recommend that you use PLOS’s NAAS tool (https://ngplosjournals.pagemajik.ai/artanalysis) to test your figure files. NAAS can convert your figure files to the TIFF file type and meet basic requirements (such as print size, resolution), or provide you with a report on issues that do not meet our requirements and that NAAS cannot fix.

After uploading your figures to PLOS’s NAAS tool - https://ngplosjournals.pagemajik.ai/artanalysis, NAAS will process the files provided and display the results in the "Uploaded Files" section of the page as the processing is complete. If the uploaded figures meet our requirements (or NAAS is able to fix the files to meet our requirements), the figure will be marked as "fixed" above. If NAAS is unable to fix the files, a red "failed" label will appear above. When NAAS has confirmed that the figure files meet our requirements, please download the file via the download option, and include these NAAS processed figure files when submitting your revised manuscript.

Added value of a priori bias correction for dynamical downscaling - A case study of coastal

British Columbia

PCLM-D-25-00319R2

Dear Dr. Hingmire,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'Added value of a priori bias correction for dynamical downscaling - A case study of coastal

British Columbia' 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.

IMPORTANT: The editorial review process is now complete. PLOS will only permit corrections to spelling, formatting or significant scientific errors from this point onwards. Requests for major changes, or any which affect the scientific understanding of your work, will cause delays to the publication date of your manuscript.

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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,

Frédéric Cyr

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

Reviewer Comments (if any, and for reference):