Oceanic moisture sources contributing  to wintertime Euro-Atlantic blocking

Yamamoto, Ayako; Nonaka, Masami; Martineau, Patrick; Yamazaki, Akira; Kwon, Young-Oh; Nakamura, Hisashi; Taguchi, Bunmei

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/wcd-2-819-2021

Articles | Volume 2, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/wcd-2-819-2021

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/wcd-2-819-2021

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

Articles | Volume 2, issue 3

Research article

|

31 Aug 2021

Research article |

| 31 Aug 2021

Oceanic moisture sources contributing to wintertime Euro-Atlantic blocking

Ayako Yamamoto, Masami Nonaka, Patrick Martineau, Akira Yamazaki, Young-Oh Kwon, Hisashi Nakamura, and Bunmei Taguchi

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Final revised paper (published on 31 Aug 2021)
Preprint (discussion started on 19 Aug 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Review of WCD-2020-039', Anonymous Referee #1, 06 Sep 2020
RC2: 'Reviewer comments', Anonymous Referee #2, 27 Oct 2020
RC3: 'Review of wcd-2020-38', Anonymous Referee #3, 28 Oct 2020
AC1: 'Final Author Comments', Ayako Yamamoto, 24 Nov 2020

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Ayako Yamamoto on behalf of the Authors (02 May 2021) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (03 May 2021) by Christian Grams

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (11 May 2021)

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

I thank the authors for their detailed and convincing responses. They have substantially revised and improved the manuscript and extended it with additional analyses, alleviating most of my concerns raised previously. However, I do have two minor suggestions as detailed in the following.

(-) One of the main points I raised concerned the way moisture sources are identified. They are now using the diagnostic by Sodemann et al. (2008) to identify moisture uptakes along the trajectories, which also takes intermittent precipitation events into account. While this diagnostic is used to identify the moisture sources contributing to diabatic ascent (Section 4.3), the previous method is still used for stratifying trajectories according to moisture origin (Section 4.1). Why not use one method throughout? I leave it to the authors to decide whether they want to change this. At the very least, they should provide an explanation in the manuscript for not just using one method.

(-) Please reference the study where the moisture source diagnostic was first introduced (now you are refering to Pfahl et al. 2014, who employed this diagnostic).

H. Sodemann, C. Schwierz, and H. Wernli, 2008: Interannual variability of Greenland winter precipitation sources: Lagrangian moisture
diagnostic and North Atlantic Oscillation influence. J. Geo- phys. Res., 113, D03107, doi:10.1029/2007JD008503.

Other than these two points, I do not have any further concerns. I believe that this study is a valuable contribution to WCD and I recommend its acceptance.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (19 May 2021)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (10 Jun 2021) by Christian Grams

AR by Ayako Yamamoto on behalf of the Authors (27 Jun 2021) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (12 Jul 2021) by Christian Grams

AR by Ayako Yamamoto on behalf of the Authors (30 Jul 2021) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

While the key role of moist processes in blocking has recently been highlighted, their moisture sources remain unknown. Here, we investigate moisture sources for wintertime Euro-Atlantic blocks using a Lagrangian method. We show that the Gulf Stream, Kuroshio, and their extensions, along with the northeast of Hawaii, act as the primary moisture sources and springboards for particle ascent. We find that the evolution of the particle properties is sensitive to the moisture sources.