Numerical Fit Modeling for Temperature Mitigation in Arid Cities

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Read, please, the attached file

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Comment 1: "According to the model described by equations (3)-(5), the result T is linearly dependent on all input parameters."

Response 1: The change in temperature has nonlinear effect for several reasons.  First, the solar radiation is constantly changing.  Second, the temperature is the accumulation of temperature changes.

Comment 2: "What causes the nonlinearity shown in Figures 3, 5, 6? Why are the graphs sinusoidal? How is this nonlinearity mathematically determined?"

Response 2: 

Figures 3, 5 and 6 are roughly sinusoidal.  The following references (27 and 32) show that sinusoidal terms can approximately match the real situation.  Section 2.1 discusses why using sinusoidal terms is not appropriate for this model.  The primary driver of nonlinearity is mentions in the previous response.  The solar radiation changes throughout the day.  Solar radiation is a truncated sinusoidal curve.  However, sinusoidal terms are not sufficient alone because solar radiation is only one factor in temperature changes.

27.Satterlund, D. R.; Chapman, R.C.; Beach, R.D. Modeling the daily temperature cycle. Northwest science, 1983, 57, p. 1.

32. Lönnqvist, O. On the diurnal variation of surface temperature. Tellus, 1962, 14, p. 96-101. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2153-3490.1962.tb00122.x

Comment 3: "Is it plausible that the graph in Figure 4 (trend line) was created using MS Excel tools?"

Response 3:  The data is posted at the data depository.  This includes the MS Excel file where the analysis for Figure 4 was performed.  It is a relatively simple graph compared to the other figures.

Comment 4: "Generally speaking, the level of complexity of such graphs corresponds to the level of first-year students at the University."

Response 4: The graphs appear sufficiently complex so that it has spurred the questions that were answered above.

Comment 5: "The article does not have a sufficient scientific level to be published in a journal with high quartile."

Response 5: Is the paper scientific?  Yes, it applies environmental science, atmospheric science, and applied physics.  Is it worthy of publishing?  Yes, Global Climate Change is immensely important, and this paper helps provide important tools for a response to Global Climate Change.

Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Dr. Hoback,

I have identified several areas that require improvement to strengthen its scientific rigor and presentation:

- Introduction: Include a more critical comparison of calcite to alternative aerosols and further explore the ethical and logistical challenges of SRM.

- Methods: Elaborate on assumptions regarding wind dynamics and plume dispersion. Discuss the limitations of relying solely on historical data and provide suggestions for real-time validation.

- Results: Enhance the discussion of statistical analysis and variations in results. -Include additional comparisons to alternative SRM or UHI mitigation methods.

- Conclusions: Explicitly address the model's limitations regarding scalability and generalizability to diverse urban environments.

- Figures and Tables: Improve figure captions for clarity and align textual descriptions with visual data.

Best regards,

Author Response

Comment 1: "Introduction: Include a more critical comparison of calcite to alternative aerosols and further explore the ethical and logistical challenges of SRM."

Response 1: The first paragraph covers these issues briefly by referencing other work.
Alternatives to calcite were discussed in the preceding referenced paper.
Logistical and ethical challenges are not within the scope of this paper.  Each is a full-length paper on their own to come soon.  In this scientific journal it is important to focus on the scientific issues.  It will take dozens of papers to establish the scope of this proposal.

Comment 2: "Methods: Elaborate on assumptions regarding wind dynamics and plume dispersion. Discuss the limitations of relying solely on historical data and provide suggestions for real-time validation."

Response 2: The first paragraph of section 1.1 talks about wind dynamics.  Additionally, section 3.2 Advection is an issue of wind dynamics.  Dispersion is discussed in sections 1.0 and 1.1.1.  There are logistical issues in plume dispersion, but logistics is an issue for future papers.
The discussion section, 4.0, has a paragraph that discusses issues of using historical data.

Comment 3: "Results: Enhance the discussion of statistical analysis and variations in results. -Include additional comparisons to alternative SRM or UHI mitigation methods."

Response 3: The previous paper discusses alternatives and their effectiveness.

Comment 4: "Conclusions: Explicitly address the model's limitations regarding scalability and generalizability to diverse urban environments."

Response 5: Throughout the paper it is discussed how this will be applied only to cities located in arid regions.  This dramatically narrows the generalizability to just those cities.  Still for each city, a new model will have to be created using local data for heating and cooling rates.
The following text was added to the conclusion:  “For each city where this is applied, a new model must be created.  The heating and cooling rates vary by geography.  The methods are generalizable to other arid cities, but the results are not.”

Comment 6: "Figures and Tables: Improve figure captions for clarity and align textual descriptions with visual data."

Response 6: Each figure has a textural interpretation of the data.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article is devoted to a problem (obviously important) of a purely applied nature, which requires quantitative confirmation.  The attempt to mathematically substantiate the conclusions from experimental data and build some kind of theoretical basis looks rather unconvincing to me as a specialist in mathematical modelling.  But the author's research is eligible for publication in the Environmental Sciences section.   I agree that the results may be useful for specialists in the theory of climate change.  

I am grateful to the author for his responses to the comments and for the additions and corrections made.

I suggest that the article can be recommended for publication.

Author Response

Comment 1:  But the author's research is eligible for publication in the Environmental Sciences section.   I agree that the results may be useful for specialists in the theory of climate change.

Response 1:  Thank you for your approval.

Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Introduction: While you briefly touch upon alternative aerosols, the critical comparison remains underdeveloped. Additionally, the ethical and logistical challenges of solar radiation management (SRM) are still addressed only superficially. Although you argue these topics are beyond the scope of this paper, their inclusion is essential to provide context and emphasize the broader implications of your work.

Methods: The sections on wind dynamics and plume dispersion show minor elaboration, but they lack significant quantitative details or expanded discussion on the underlying assumptions. Moreover, while historical data limitations are mentioned, real-time validation strategies are not adequately explored. A deeper treatment of these issues would strengthen the methodological rigor.

Results: You have improved the clarity of the statistical analysis, but the discussion of result variations remains relatively superficial. The manuscript would benefit from more robust comparisons to other SRM strategies or urban heat island (UHI) mitigation methods. This would contextualize your findings and underscore the advantages or limitations of your approach.

Conclusions: The added text partially addresses the generalizability of the model, emphasizing its limitations for application in diverse urban environments. However, further clarification is required regarding how these models might be scaled or adapted to non-arid cities. Addressing potential scalability challenges more explicitly would enhance the impact of this section.

Figures and Tables: Figure captions have been modestly improved, yet their clarity remains suboptimal. Some figures lack alignment with their textual descriptions, potentially leading to misinterpretation.

Author Response

Comment 1:  “Introduction: While you briefly touch upon alternative aerosols, the critical comparison remains underdeveloped. Additionally, the ethical and logistical challenges of solar radiation management (SRM) are still addressed only superficially. Although you argue these topics are beyond the scope of this paper, their inclusion is essential to provide context and emphasize the broader implications of your work.”

Response 1:  New expanded descriptions of ethical and logistical challenges are now included in the introduction.  See the highlighted text in the first paragraph and further into section 1.

Comment 2: “Methods: The sections on wind dynamics and plume dispersion show minor elaboration, but they lack significant quantitative details or expanded discussion on the underlying assumptions. Moreover, while historical data limitations are mentioned, real-time validation strategies are not adequately explored. A deeper treatment of these issues would strengthen the methodological rigor.”

Response 2:  Section 2.3 now includes “Wind varied from 0 to 38.9 m/s in the full height of the atmosphere, but in the lowest altitudes, the wind was usually below 10 m/s.  The full list of data by hour and altitude provided in the supplemental data.  The biggest effect of the wind speed is on logistics because it was assumed that higher wind requires greater mass of calcite to maintain a constant effect on solar radiation.  Therefore, it is assumed that wind has no effect on the radiation rates in the model.”

Additionally, new text is added at the end of the discussion section about real time validation.

Comment 3: “Results: You have improved the clarity of the statistical analysis, but the discussion of result variations remains relatively superficial. The manuscript would benefit from more robust comparisons to other SRM strategies or urban heat island (UHI) mitigation methods. This would contextualize your findings and underscore the advantages or limitations of your approach.”

Response 3: Comparison to UHI has been added to the Discussion section.  The other SRM strategies are compared in the Discussion section.

Comment 4:  “Conclusions: The added text partially addresses the generalizability of the model, emphasizing its limitations for application in diverse urban environments. However, further clarification is required regarding how these models might be scaled or adapted to non-arid cities. Addressing potential scalability challenges more explicitly would enhance the impact of this section.”

Response 4:  Additional text was added:  “Section 3.1 illustrates that this method can be applied to humid cities.  However, it was necessary to have extensive data about the clouds that were present.  This is more data than found in weather reports.  Therefore, to apply this to humid cities requires a modification to account for clouds such as CONCLD or other equivalent data.”

Comment 5: “Figures and Tables: Figure captions have been modestly improved, yet their clarity remains suboptimal. Some figures lack alignment with their textual descriptions, potentially leading to misinterpretation.”

Response 5: Thank you for noticing that.  I think the editors will need to help assure that the alignment is fixed.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Read, please, the attached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you for your thorough review that helped to improve this paper.

Comment 1:  The main remark concerns the fact that the reviewed article is not appropriate for the journal ‘Applied science’ according to the journal's criteria.

Response 1:  The editors can make this decision.  The journal scope is:  “The journal covers all aspects of applied physics, applied chemistry, engineering, environmental and earth sciences, and applied biology.”  The research project is interdisciplinary and covers all of these areas.  This paper specifically applies physics principles to an issue of environmental science.  Therefore, I feel that it fits.

Comment 2:  The article describes the problem, but there is no mathematical model except for a single abstract equation on page 4, line 192.

Response 2: See the new equations 2 through 5.  The basic modeling equations were written out.

Comment 2:  The graphs presented are unknown.

Response 2: Figures 1 and 3 were improved by changing labels or adding descriptors.

Comment 3: The article mentions the already developed SCAM6 model (page 9, line 357), but there are no mathematical formulas. The principle question: what does the author program?

Response 3: A description was added that the numerical model was run in Excel.  The file is available in the supplemental information.  The SCAM6 model was run in the previous research.  That was programmed in Fortran.

Comment 4:  Where did the author get the ‘numerical procedure’ (page 12, line 446)?

Response 4: The conclusion was reworded to say that it refers to the methods section of this paper.

Comment 5:  The ‘equation and multiple equations’ are mentioned on page 5, lines 215, 216 without their general form.

Response 5: The equations added now to the end of the section.

Comment 6:  The article mentions the use of ‘supercomputer model procedure’ (page 12, line 448). Where is it?

Response 6: The supercomputer model is in the previous work.  The conclusion was reworded so that this is clear.

Comment 7:  Finally, the percentage of self-plagiarism also seems unacceptable. For example, a lot of the text coincides with whole sentences from the article “Effectiveness of Using Calcite as an Aerosol to Remediate the Urban Heat Island”

Response 7:  The only text that is repeated from the previous paper is the paragraph about the environmental concerns.  The paragraph was rewritten so that it does not duplicate the previous paper.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1. Introduction:

   • Background: The introduction provides a foundational understanding of solar radiation management (SRM) and urban temperature mitigation. However, additional references on regional climate interventions, especially urban-specific models, would add depth.
   • Objective Clarification: While your main objective is clearly stated, I recommend elaborating on the limitations of past models to set a clearer justification for the numerical fit model.

2. Methods:

   • Parameter Definition: Ensure clarity in parameter selection, such as plume density, particle size, and dispersion rates. Providing specific values or ranges will enhance reproducibility.
   • Model Constraints: The exclusion of advection effects is a notable limitation. Although you discuss it later, this choice should be justified within the methods.
   • Validation: The manuscript lacks a clear validation of the numerical fit model against empirical data from real-world arid cities or previously established models. I recommend adding this or discussing possible approaches to validation.

3. Results:

   • Statistical Rigor: The results section would benefit from statistical measures to support claims of significance, such as confidence intervals or p-values.
   • Presentation: Figures are helpful but should include clear labels, units, and, if possible, summary statistics to improve readability and support your claims.

4. Discussion:

   • Comparative Analysis: Consider adding a comparative analysis of different SRM techniques or including a discussion on the potential ecological impacts of calcite plumes.
   • Model Limitations: While some model limitations (e.g., the lack of advection) are discussed, this section would benefit from a broader examination of potential biases and assumptions in the modeling approach.

5. Language and Presentation:

   • English Language: Several sections could benefit from language refinement, particularly in conveying complex scientific ideas with clarity and precision.

6. References:

   • Additional Citations: Some claims lack appropriate citations. I recommend updating the reference list to include recent studies on numerical weather prediction models and urban heat mitigation.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Several sections could benefit from language refinement, particularly in conveying complex scientific ideas with clarity and precision.

Author Response

Thank you for your thorough review that helped to improve this paper.

Comment 1:  Background: The introduction provides a foundational understanding of solar radiation management (SRM) and urban temperature mitigation. However, additional references on regional climate interventions, especially urban-specific models, would add depth.

Response 1: The discussion was expanded.

Comment 2: Objective Clarification: While your main objective is clearly stated, I recommend elaborating on the limitations of past models to set a clearer justification for the numerical fit model.

Response 2: Discussion was added about the limits of other fit models.

Comment 3: Parameter Definition: Ensure clarity in parameter selection, such as plume density, particle size, and dispersion rates. Providing specific values or ranges will enhance reproducibility.

Response 3: The introduction was reworded to say the goal is a half reduction in solar radiation.  The introduction now discusses the difficulty in giving estimates of the mass of dust since it changes with wind speed.

Comment 4: The exclusion of advection effects is a notable limitation. Although you discuss it later, this choice should be justified within the methods.

Response 4: A discussion of this limitation was added to the earlier sections.

Comment 5: The manuscript lacks a clear validation of the numerical fit model against empirical data from real-world arid cities or previously established models. I recommend adding this or discussing possible approaches to validation.

Response 5: The only validation possible currently is against other modeling methods.  That was included.  Experimental validation is necessary, but much more theoretical work is needed before that can happen.

Comment 6: The results section would benefit from statistical measures to support claims of significance, such as confidence intervals or p-values.

Response 6: For 3D models, this is done with ensemble forecasts.  This was mentioned in the paper.  The statistical rigor of the new work is only found in the extent that it matches the results of previous models.  If the results match, then it is assumed the statistical limits of previous methods apply.

Comment 7: Figures are helpful but should include clear labels, units, and, if possible, summary statistics to improve readability and support your claims.

Response 7: Figures 1 and 3 were improved by changing labels or adding descriptors.

Comment 8: Consider adding a comparative analysis of different SRM techniques or including a discussion on the potential ecological impacts of calcite plumes.

Response 8: A brief statement was added at the end of the introduction.  It said that the ecological concerns need to be considered.  The discussion section compares the efficacy of various SRM methods.

Comment 9: While some model limitations (e.g., the lack of advection) are discussed, this section would benefit from a broader examination of potential biases and assumptions in the modeling approach.

Response 9: A discussion was added of the biases that could occur when using the method for predicting future weather.

Comment 10: Several sections could benefit from language refinement, particularly in conveying complex scientific ideas with clarity and precision.

Response 10: The paper was significantly edited for language.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article has passed through cosmetic changes. These changes do not make it possible to state that the presented research is qualitative and mathematically substantiated. The level of research does not allow for criticism in terms of scientific validity and logic. The author's answers are purely formal.

Author Response

Comment 1: The article has passed through cosmetic changes. These changes do not make it possible to state that the presented research is qualitative and mathematically substantiated. The level of research does not allow for criticism in terms of scientific validity and logic. The author's answers are purely formal.

Reply 1: Thank you for your rigorous review in round 1 that allowed improvements in the paper.  Additional changes have been made which hopefully meets your concerns.  Statistical results have been shown.  Please see the attachment.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I acknowledge the advancements made in response to the prior comments and suggestions. While the revision has addressed several points effectively, a few areas remain to be strengthened to ensure the manuscript reaches its fullest potential.

The revised introduction now provides a solid overview of solar radiation management and urban heat island mitigation. However, the addition of urban-specific climate modeling references remains insufficient. Citations on regional climate interventions, particularly focusing on arid regions, would further contextualize your work.

The manuscript now better articulates the research objective and hypothesis, specifically the development of a numerical fit model for arid climates. However, limitations of previous models are still not sufficiently emphasized, which would better justify the necessity of your approach.

The revised methods section includes some specific ranges and variables for parameters. However, providing more explicit numerical ranges for plume characteristics (e.g., particle size distribution) would enhance reproducibility.

The manuscript now acknowledges the lack of real-world validation data for arid cities. While you propose future empirical validation, a brief discussion of surrogate data sources or methods would improve credibility.

The results section now incorporates improved figures with clearer annotations. Nevertheless, statistical rigor is still limited. Incorporating confidence intervals or p-values for your predictions would strengthen the scientific robustness of your claims.

Author Response

Comment 1: 

I acknowledge the advancements made in response to the prior comments and suggestions. While the revision has addressed several points effectively, a few areas remain to be strengthened to ensure the manuscript reaches its fullest potential.

The revised introduction now provides a solid overview of solar radiation management and urban heat island mitigation. However, the addition of urban-specific climate modeling references remains insufficient. Citations on regional climate interventions, particularly focusing on arid regions, would further contextualize your work.

Response 1:   See the new information at the beginning of section 1.1 for urban-specific climate modeling.  See the first paragraph for more about intervention in arid cities.

Comment 2: 

The manuscript now better articulates the research objective and hypothesis, specifically the development of a numerical fit model for arid climates. However, limitations of previous models are still not sufficiently emphasized, which would better justify the necessity of your approach.

Response 2:  

See the new third paragraph.

Comment 3:

The revised methods section includes some specific ranges and variables for parameters. However, providing more explicit numerical ranges for plume characteristics (e.g., particle size distribution) would enhance reproducibility.

Response 3:

The end of section 1.0 now discusses the technologies used to produce the specific particle size distribution that will be used.

Comment 4:

The manuscript now acknowledges the lack of real-world validation data for arid cities. While you propose future empirical validation, a brief discussion of surrogate data sources or methods would improve credibility.

Response 4:

See the new paragraph at the end of the discussion section.

Comment 5:

The results section now incorporates improved figures with clearer annotations. Nevertheless, statistical rigor is still limited. Incorporating confidence intervals or p-values for your predictions would strengthen the scientific robustness of your claims.

Response 5:

See the added p-values in sections 2.3 and 3.1.