Microphysical features of typhoon and non-typhoon rainfall observed in Taiwan, an island in the northwestern Pacific

Janapati, Jayalakshmi; Seela, Balaji Kumar; Lin, Pay-Liam; Lee, Meng-Tze; Joseph, Everette

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-4025-2021

Articles | Volume 25, issue 7

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-4025-2021

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-4025-2021

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

Articles | Volume 25, issue 7

Research article

|

09 Jul 2021

Research article |

| 09 Jul 2021

Microphysical features of typhoon and non-typhoon rainfall observed in Taiwan, an island in the northwestern Pacific

Jayalakshmi Janapati, Balaji Kumar Seela, Pay-Liam Lin, Meng-Tze Lee, and Everette Joseph

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Final revised paper (published on 09 Jul 2021)
Preprint (discussion started on 21 Aug 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Potentially interesting paper', Anonymous Referee #1, 16 Sep 2020
- AC1: 'Response to comments from Reviewer #1', Jayalakshmi J, 09 Nov 2020
RC2: 'review', Anonymous Referee #2, 21 Sep 2020
- AC2: 'Response to comments from reviewer #2', Jayalakshmi J, 09 Nov 2020

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (13 Nov 2020) by Carlo De Michele

AR by Jayalakshmi J on behalf of the Authors (16 Nov 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (16 Nov 2020) by Carlo De Michele

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (16 Nov 2020) by Carlo De Michele

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (15 Dec 2020)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (18 Jan 2021)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Second review of the paper “ Microphysical features of typhoon and non-typhoon rainfall observed in Taiwan, an island in the northwest Pacific” by Janapati and colleagues.

The manuscript has been substantially re-written improving the language and the readability of the text. I’m still not fully convinced about the quality of the language, but, since I’m not a native English speaker, I do not want to focus on this issue.

Coming to the scientific side, I see two major issues that the Authors should fix (or, at least, deeply discuss) in the text before the manuscript is accepted for publication on HESS.

First, the distinction between TY and NTY spectra is rather weak (fig. 3), and the Authors should show that the spectra variability within TY and NTY classes is smaller than the differences between averaged TY and NTY spectra. The Authors, for instance, could add to the averaged spectra in Fig. 3 the curves of mean spectra +- one standard deviation. Also other results show very similar values between TY and NTY samples. In the conclusion, the sentence: “Likelihood for the diverse microphysical processes between TY and NTY rainfall is exemplified by exclusive separation in TY and NTY rainfall normalized raindrop spectra at D/Dm > 2”, is not supported by evidence. There is no “exclusive separation” in figure 3b beyond D/Dm=2: we can see that there is an evidence that NTY precipitation has higher occurrence of larger drops.

A second issue is on the JW performances under Typhoon weather, i.e. when rain comes together with strong winds. The hypothesis that drops fall vertically at terminal velocity, does still hold under very strong horizontal winds? There are any measurements of wind speed in TY and NTY days?

Minor comments

Lines 122-113. “if a typhoon was invaded…” does it mean that the “typhoon center” invaded, or simply some piece of the cloud structure invaded the box?

Line 175. I do not thing that “formidable” is the right adjective here.

Line 226. In my opinion “weather system” cannot be an attribute of NTY cases, since many different weather systems can occur in NTY days. I suggest to use “weather condition” or “weather settings”, instead.

Lines 393-395. This sentence needs rewriting, in this way is unclear.

Table 2. Please, report the unit for RMSE

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ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by editor and referees) (19 Feb 2021) by Carlo De Michele

AR by Jayalakshmi J on behalf of the Authors (19 Mar 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (12 Apr 2021) by Carlo De Michele

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (30 Apr 2021)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (06 May 2021)

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (26 May 2021) by Carlo De Michele

AR by Jayalakshmi J on behalf of the Authors (01 Jun 2021) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

Typhoon (TY) and non-typhoon (NTY) rainy days in northern Taiwan summer seasons showed more large drops on NTY than TY rainy days. Relatively higher convective activity and drier conditions in NTY than TY lead to variations in microphysical characteristics between TY and NTY rainy days. The raindrop size distribution and kinetic energy relations assessed for TY and NTY rainfall can be useful for evaluating the radar rainfall estimation algorithms, cloud modeling, and rainfall erosivity studies.