Comment on Shamsaei et al. The Role of Fuel Characteristics and Heat Release Formulations in Coupled Fire-Atmosphere Simulation. Fire 2023, 6, 264
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors We acknowledge to have a mistake in our original manuscript. We are working to fix that mistake and publish a correction in the near future.Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Comment 1: Shamsaei et al. (2023) did not intend to implement the heat release as a divergence of a distributed heat flux, but as a source term. Therefore, the model labeled as Shamsaei TG is not implemented as intended in the current manuscript, and the results labeled Shamsaei TG do not accurately reflect the effects of a distributed heat source term model. The authors may consider removing the related results from the manuscript or revising the presentation. We admit that our implementation of the model in WRF-Fire version 4.6.1 was not correct. It included two mistakes that we plan to correct. However, the results presented in the manuscript accurately reflect the inaccurate implementation in WRF-Fire version 4.6.1.
Response 1: In the paper, the implemented version noted TG WRF 4.6.1 corresponds to the flux divergence implementation. The original formulation describing the source term is denoted as TG Shamsaei in the paper. The results labeled Shamsaei do reflect the behavior of the scheme as formulated in Shamsaei et al. (2023). It would not be fair to remove this part from the manuscript. An appendix has been added to the paper to show that the main issue of the original formulation is the discretized form. Despite being correct in its continuous form, the TG scheme suffers from sampling errors once discretized. The mesh convergence analysis added as an appendix shows that the TG scheme can display energy-conserving properties for very fine meshes that are usually not usable in a WRF simulation.
Comment 2: While the manuscript correctly identifies the error in our previous work, the tone of critique could be perceived as dismissive. We believe it would be constructive to acknowledge that Shamsaei et al. (2023) helped raise important discussion points, even if some conclusions were affected by implementation errors. A more balanced framing would foster scholarly collaboration and strengthen the value of this exchange for the community
Response 2: We acknowledge the efforts of our colleagues to raise the concern of energy conservation in the vertical heat flux distribution scheme. This has led to an improvement in the scheme that will benefit the entire coupled fire atmosphere community. A paragraph has been added in the acknowledgment section to emphasize the collaboration and constructive discussion that we had.
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsNo comments - accept as is
