cc: C G Kilsby date: Mon Jan 12 12:25:04 2009 from: Phil Jones subject: Re: JOC-08-0245 - Decision on Manuscript to: g.mcgregor@auckland.ac.nz Glenn, I'm afraid these two reviews will definitely discourage me from submitting more papers to IJC! The two reviewers have not realized the novelty of this paper. The WG is fairly new and we are certainly not re-inventing the wheel! We didn't do an in-depth literature review because of space. If you were still in the UK, you'd see this whole UKCIP08 package (now to be called UKCP09) including this WG coming out in the spring time (April/May). To give you one example - all the papers referred to by the reviewers only work at sites with data. The WG in the paper works anywhere in the UK. We've had the WG Report which will form part of the UKCP09 package formally reviewed very favourably by three experts in the field. You've missed a good paper for IJC here! Your reviewers have not read it carefully enough - nor understood what it was about. Maybe the latter is my fault, attempting to explain too much in a single paper, but I would have hoped for something more constructive. You can ignore this email if you want. I won't be submitting this paper to IJC again. On the other paper of mine you rejected a couple of months ago, I'm going to re-submit that somewhere else now. These reviews were constructive, especially the positive one - that you chose to ignore. At least the reviewers understood what the paper was about. Cheers Phil At 10:51 12/01/2009, you wrote: 12-Jan-2009 Dear Prof. Jones Manuscript # JOC-08-0245 entitled "Perturbing a Weather Generator using factors developed from Regional Climate Model simulations" which you submitted to the International Journal of Climatology, has been reviewed. The comments of the referee(s), all of whom are leading international experts in this field, are included at the bottom of this letter. If the reviewer submitted comments as an attachment this will only be visible via your Author Centre. It will not be attached to this email. Log in to Manuscript Central, go to your Author Centre, find your manuscript in the "Manuscripts with Decisions" queue. Click on the Decision Letter link. Within the Decision letter is a further link to the reviewer attachment. In view of the comments of the referee(s) your manuscript has been denied publication in the International Journal of Climatology. Thank you for considering the International Journal of Climatology for the publication of your research. I hope the outcome of this specific submission will not discourage you from submitting future manuscripts. Sincerely, Prof. Glenn McGregor Editor, International Journal of Climatology g.mcgregor@auckland.ac.nz NOTE FROM EDITOR I have taken the above decision as there appears to be a number of problems with the paper including a deficient review of the literature, few innovative aspects and a lack of analysis rigour. Sorry I could not be more positive. =========================== Referee(s)' Comments to Author: Referee: 1 Comments to the Author The paper describes how to link a weather generator, which was developed and published by the authors, with predictions from the regional climate model to provide end-users with daily climate scenarios for impact assessments as a part of the UKCIP08 project. This manuscript has major flaws. 1. The problem of linking WG with the output of global or regional climate models (GCM/RegCM) to generate daily climate scenarios required by process-based impact models is not new. Wilks (1992) described the method of linking the WGEN weather generator based on a Markov chain model for precipitation with climate predictions derived from GCM. In Barrow et al (1996), a methodology of linking the LARS-WG weather generator based on series approach with HadCM2 was described and used in the European project on the assessment of climate change on agriculture in Europe. From 2002, high resolution daily site-specific climate scenarios based on LARS-WG and HadRM3 (UKCIP02) predictions were available for the academic community to study impact of climate change in the UK (Semenov, 2007). A similar work has been done for the Met&Rol generator in Check Republic (Dubrovsky et al, 2004). None of this works has been cited, and their manuscript authors are trying to rediscoverEthe wheel. 2. The methodology of assessing the performance of WG is well established. Statistical tests are used to compare probability distributions of observed and simulated weather variables (e.g. the K-S test), the t-test and f-test are used to compare observed and simulated means and variances, the extreme values theory is used to assess how well WG reproduces weather extreme events (Semenov et al, 1998, Qian et al 2004, 2008; Kesley et al, 2005; Semenov, 2008). In this paper, authors used a visualEcomparison to compare observed and simulated means by plotting data points on a graph. This is unacceptable, because no objective conclusions can be derived from such comparison. Proper statistical tests must be used instead. I recommend to reject this manuscript, it is well below the standard acceptable in IJC or any other refereed journals. The manuscript did not contribute to the area of research, and the methodology used for comparison is naiveEand unaccepted in scientific publications. ============================== Referee: 2 Comments to the Author All comments to the Author are found in the attached file. Prof. Phil Jones Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090 School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784 University of East Anglia Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk NR4 7TJ UK ----------------------------------------------------------------------------