Svalbard’s Mesoscale Environmental Factor Impact on the Wind Field

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Review of “Svalbard’s mesoscale environmental factor impact on the wind field” by Kitowska and Petelski

In this paper, the authors discuss the mesoscale effect that influences the atmospheric circulations patterns. Based on their analysis, it is found that mostly the difference between the air temperature over the land and sea caused the formations of the local circulations. I have some minor comments and queries that the authors can implement in the revised manuscript after which it can be accepted.

1. The authors should include the spatial distribution of winds (vector plots), which would be helpful to the readers to understand the mesoscale circulations.
2. At what levels the winds were measured at the stations?
3. It would be nice if the authors could show at which vertical levels the winds are more prominent that respond to differences in the air temperature.
4. How are the authors detaching the mesoscale circulations from the large-scale circulations?
5. What is the role of sea ice in temperatures in modulating circulations?
6. Authors should first show the synoptic mesoscale circulations in different seasons along with the temperature and sea-level pressure over the domain as shown in figure 13.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors demonstrate the role of the mesoscale effect on wind in the Svalbard region using four types of data with different scale. The statistics is valuable. However, there are still some questions which have to be clarified. Here are the comments:

Major comments

1. The authors used a lot of histograms to describe the association between land-sea breeze type and situations of the 21 circulation types. It would be easy to understand the association when some spatial pattern is demonstrated. Therefore, I suggest that the spatial pattern for the land-sea breeze type and some of the 21 circulation types should be demonstrated.
2. Most of the analysis that is used to explain the result of the histograms in the article is based on speculation. There is no enough information to prove the statement. For example, in line 221 ~ line 223, “ The reason …….is the same as the large-scale one”, the pressure gradient should be shown in the article. Similar situation should be applied in many places in the article.
3. The association in between the land-sea breeze type and wind fields with different scale should be discussed more clearly.

Minor comment:

1. Line 113~ 122: The spatial resolution of the four types of data should be mentioned.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have made some revision for the manuscript. This version of the manuscript is better than previous one. However, some discussion of mechanism about the influence of mesoscale effect on local wind field is still not so clear. For example, in section 3.4, the statistics of temperature for a land-sea breeze type respectively in Hornsund and Kongsfjord are listed in Table 1. Some discussion between large-scale, mesoscale, and small scale processes on local wind field is made. But how do they work to each other is still not found. In addition to the difference of temperature, maybe a composite of the cross-section for a given region with the vertical wind profile accompanied by the temperature in lower boundary is useful to demonstrate the processes in different scales. Therefore, I would like to suggest that authors can consider to give some composite of circulation maps, which could be done by Era-Interim reanalysis data, when doing mechanism discussion.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Once again, we would like to thank you for your careful review of our work and for your valuable comments which have helped us improve this article.
As suggested, we have added wind speed and direction as well as air temperature distributions for a few selected cases of land-sea breeze mesoscale circulation.

Best regards, 

Małgorzata Kitowska