The storm-track suppression over the western North Pacific  from a cyclone life-cycle perspective

Schemm, Sebastian; Wernli, Heini; Binder, Hanin

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/wcd-2-55-2021

Articles | Volume 2, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/wcd-2-55-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/wcd-2-55-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 2, issue 1

Research article

|

20 Jan 2021

Research article |

| 20 Jan 2021

The storm-track suppression over the western North Pacific from a cyclone life-cycle perspective

Sebastian Schemm, Heini Wernli, and Hanin Binder

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Final revised paper (published on 20 Jan 2021)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 19 Aug 2020)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of "The North Pacific Storm-Track Suppression Explained From a Cyclone Life-Cycle Perspective" by Schemm, Wernli and Binder', Anonymous Referee #1, 21 Sep 2020
- AC1: 'Reply to RC1', Sebastian Schemm, 19 Nov 2020
RC2: 'Review of "The North Pacific Storm-Track Suppression Explained From a Cyclone Life-Cycle Perspective"', Anonymous Referee #2, 21 Sep 2020
- AC2: 'Reply to RC2', Sebastian Schemm, 19 Nov 2020
EC1: 'Editor's comments', David Battisti, 01 Oct 2020
- AC3: 'Reply to EC1', Sebastian Schemm, 19 Nov 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Sebastian Schemm on behalf of the Authors (26 Nov 2020) Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (28 Nov 2020) by David Battisti

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (22 Dec 2020)

For final publication, the manuscript should be

accepted as is

accepted subject to technical corrections

accepted subject to minor revisions

reconsidered after major revisions

I would be willing to review the revised paper, if the editor considers it necessary.

I am not willing to review the revised paper.

rejected

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have improved the presentation and have added analyses and some discussions. Overall the paper is a nice and important contribution to our understanding of midwinter suppression specifically, and more generally, to how the statistics of single-storm evolutions combine to give the Eularian diagnostics of storm tracks.

The authors added an analysis of eddy statistics in an area centered about the seasonally varying climatological baroclinic conversion, which is where the eddies draw energy from the mean flow APE. This is a nice choice since the peak baroclinic conversion region, which indicates where growth via extraction of mean PE, remains concentrated in the western Pacific. I agree with the authors that this is better than my initial suggestion to examine the statistics following the EKE maximum which peaks in the central pacific and is fed by cyclones originating in different regions than are shown in figure 2.

I find the paper worthy of publication, but suggest making some minor clarifications.

1) The authors added a calculation of the baroclinic conversion efficiency, and this helps clarify some of the statements in the original version, however, I think the authors should add a paragraph in section 2.2 discussing what this quantity means qualitatively, and not just refer the reader to Schemm and Rivier's 2019 paper. The way I see it, after going through Schemm and Riviere (2019) is that the baroclinic conversion efficiency isolates the influence of the eddy structure (vertical-horizontal tilt of the geopotential height surfaces relative to the mean flow temperature gradients) on the magnitude of the baroclinic conversion, as opposed to the influence of the mean flow baroclinicity.

2) Figure 7.
The authors should clarify if the regions are kept similar in terms of longitudinal range and shifted latitudinally only, and if the area of the moving box is kept equal between the months or not. Also I would increase the black dots along the tracks and thicken the black box a bit to make them clearer to the eye

3) Figure 8 - looking at the figure I think the important feature for the midwinter minimum is the the *difference* between the before and after max-deepening which varies significanly between the months. The changes between Nov-Jan-Mar in the values before, or the values after the max deepening are not that large - specifically line 350- "The midwinter suppression affects only time steps after maximum deepening (gray boxes in Fig. 8)." is confusing because the Nov-Jan increase in the before box is larger than the Nov-Jan decrease in the after box, but the drop in baroclinic conversion is much larger and I think this is what makes the difference because the EKE values in the northern box result from an integration over the whole eddy life cycle.

4) sentence on lines 175-176 is very confusing

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (30 Dec 2020) by David Battisti

AR by Sebastian Schemm on behalf of the Authors (11 Jan 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (13 Jan 2021) by David Battisti

AR by Sebastian Schemm on behalf of the Authors (13 Jan 2021)

Short summary

North Pacific cyclone intensities are reduced in winter, which is in contrast to North Atlantic cyclones and unexpected from the high available growth potential in winter. We investigate this intensity suppression from a cyclone life-cycle perspective and show that in winter Kuroshio cyclones propagate away from the region where they can grow more quickly, East China Sea cyclones are not relevant before spring, and Kamchatka cyclones grow in a region of reduced growth potential.