Climate change and non-stationary flood risk for the upper Truckee River basin

Condon, L. E.; Gangopadhyay, S.; Pruitt, T.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-19-159-2015

Articles | Volume 19, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-19-159-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-19-159-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 19, issue 1

Research article

|

12 Jan 2015

Research article |

| 12 Jan 2015

Climate change and non-stationary flood risk for the upper Truckee River basin

L. E. Condon, S. Gangopadhyay, and T. Pruitt

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Final revised paper (published on 12 Jan 2015)
Preprint (discussion started on 16 May 2014)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC C1818: 'Referee's comment', Anonymous Referee #1, 10 Jun 2014
- AC C4027: 'Response to Referee 1', Laura Condon, 25 Sep 2014
RC C2581: 'Review of manuscript Climate change and non-stationary flood risk for the Upper Truckee River Basin', Anonymous Referee #2, 18 Jul 2014
- AC C4028: 'Response to Referee 2', Laura Condon, 25 Sep 2014
SC C2705: 'Short Comment', John England, 25 Jul 2014
- AC C4029: 'Response to John England', Laura Condon, 25 Sep 2014

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (25 Sep 2014) by Ralf Merz

AR by Laura Condon on behalf of the Authors (22 Oct 2014) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (23 Oct 2014) by Ralf Merz

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (31 Oct 2014)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (02 Nov 2014)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The revised manuscript does address many of my prior comments. However, two important comments were not adequately addressed and should be addressed prior to accepting this for publication. These are explained in detail below.
1) In my prior comment 3, I mentioned that by lumping a very wide range of future emissions pathways into a single pool of projections, important distinctions between the variability in projections of the future atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and the uncertainty in the response of the earth system to that. In their response, they show a graph (Figure 1 in the response file) demonstrating little correspondence of flooding and emissions pathway. This explanation is helpful, but two things should be added to the revised manuscript: 1) This figure should be included; 2) A sentence should be added explaining that “for this flood statistic in this basin, the projected change through mid-late 21st century is not highly dependent on the emissions pathway” or something to that extent. This is important because for other locations and impact metrics this will certainly NOT be the case (especially looking at more temperature-driven impacts later in the 21st century, and into the 22nd). Readers should not interpret this as a generalized finding that is necessarily applicable elsewhere, but should be established on a case-by-case basis.

2) Also part of my prior comment 3 I had noted that there did not appear to be a need to include all 234 projections. In my suggestion that a smaller ensemble of GCMs be selected, the authors focused on the difficulty in selecting GCMs, but missed my larger point (I can see from my wording how this could have been misinterpreted). I agree with the authors that selecting GCMs for an impact study is not well established, and many studies have shown that randomly selected ensembles of GCMs generally provide uncertainty estimates similar to those of any skill-based selection method. But some of the same references cited by the authors in their response (e.g., Pierce et al., 2009) show that after 10-14 GCMs are included in an ensemble of projections, little is gained by adding more projections. In a similar study to the submitted manuscript, Harding et al. (HESS, 2012) used all available projections (112 CMIP3 projections from the USBR website), but found that any randomly chosen set of 48 produced indistinguishable results (they did not look at smaller subsets). Thus, the use of 234 projections appears to be overkill by at least an order of magnitude. My concern here is that if others were to attempt to use this study to guide an effort, they could unnecessarily feel the need to include hundreds of projections, when using a dozen or two would almost certainly provide the same answers. What I would recommend at this point is that the authors include a sentence in the text (and perhaps in the conclusions as well) explaining this, such as “While we include 234 projections of future climate in this study, others (Pierce et al, 2009; Harding et al, 2012,…) have demonstrated that considerably smaller sets of projections can provide comparable results.”

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (Editor review) (17 Nov 2014) by Ralf Merz

AR by Laura Condon on behalf of the Authors (26 Nov 2014) Author's response

ED: Publish as is (12 Dec 2014) by Ralf Merz