the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 23 Jun 2026
Hurricanes that haven’t happened, yet: Identifying unprecedented tropical cyclone scenarios
Abstract. Tropical cyclones (TCs) can be unprecedented in many dimensions and can result in disasters when they are unforeseen. We conduct an intercomparison of four TC databases to identify plausible synthetic events that would exceed observational records, and argue that these provide robust and evidence-based scenarios for disaster management use. We compare datasets produced by two statistical TC track models and a newly published TC track hindcast archive from numerical weather predictions: STORM (n = 712,800), IRIS (n= 472,162), and WATTCH (n= 36,793). For all six TC basins, we explore how each dataset characterises unprecedented extreme events in terms of lifetime maximum intensity, 24 h changes in wind speed, monthly frequency of Category 4 and 5 storms, and latitude at first landfall. We assess how each dataset represents the basin-level observational record from IBTrACS by conducting a series of fidelity tests (mean, standard deviation, kurtosis, and skewness) to assess whether their most extreme events could be considered plausible in the current climate. Between 50 % and 89 % of dataset-basin combinations pass at least 2/4 fidelity tests if we include where models indicate underestimation. From this, we identify several hundreds of plausible simulated TCs that exceed historical records in different ways. Where datasets show good fidelity, we illustrate the potential use of these datasets by extracting unprecedented scenarios such as a Category 5 TC hitting southern Madagascar or a TC making landfall on the city of Xai-Xai in Mozambique south of the country's most southerly landfall. Based on this work, we underscore an opportunity for disaster management practitioners to access unprecedented TC scenarios relevant to their work and that would be both robust and imaginative, going beyond current practice.
- Preprint
(2347 KB) - Metadata XML
- BibTeX
- EndNote
Status: final response (author comments only)
-
RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2026-2758', Anonymous Referee #1, 01 Jul 2026
-
AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Dorothy Heinrich, 16 Sep 2026
General
The author team present an interesting study which certainly fits NHESS. Still, the structure lacks clarity and the quality of the figures does not meet the standard for publication. Also, the results are in a stage of the zero-order draft so I recommend major revision.
Dear reviewer, many thanks for your interest and for taking the time to provide these thoughtful comments. We have responded to each of them below and made revisions in the manuscript accordingly. Reflecting comments related to the quality of the figures and some complexities of interpretation, we have remade all of them, notably according to NHESS guidelines on image quality. We have also reviewed the methods and discussion sections to add detail and clarifications accordingly. To also help with clarity, we have proposed a change to how we report the fidelity test results which we have redone in the form of coloured matrices in the manuscript rather than the original tables which were harder to interpret. We have rerun all results with suggestions from the second reviewer, and have moved the full fidelity test results as tables in the supplementary material.
Major
- There are some structural issues, e.g. L138-149 belongs to the introduction. L320-335 belongs to the methods. The manuscript contains repetitions.
Thank you for this comment. We have made both these structural changes and doing so have also reviewed repetitive sentences in the hope this contributes to tightening the narrative.
- The results contain bullet lists which look like a zero-order draft. So please rewrite the result sections in a flow text.
Thank you for highlighting this. We had originally thought that bullet points might be easier for a reader to follow, but have turned them back into paragraphs following this comment and made changes to the wording to respond to later comments as well. We have also removed some repetition we found in the process.
Minor
Title: The title is a bit repetitive, so I suggest to use the second part: “Identifying unprecedented tropical cyclone scenarios”.
Thank you for this suggestion on which we have long reflected. We would like to propose to remove the first part but slightly extend the title to increase the precision. If the editor and reviewers agree, the new title could read: "Identifying plausible unprecedented tropical cyclone scenarios".
L15: TCs can also result in disaster when they are foreseen, so remove “when they are unforeseen”
This is a good point which we very much agree with! We have altered the text to read “can result in humanitarian disasters, especially if they are unforeseen” to highlight that lack of forecasts, inadequate warning, and mismatched preparedness can exacerbate disasters when TCs do occur. We fully agree that extreme weather turn into disasters when they intersect with many other factors including vulnerability, exposure, and response capacity (notably as highlighted by the No Natural Disaster campaign calls)
Introduction: It is rather uncommon the use subsections in the introduction (except in review articles), please make one flow text. This will be fixed in the revised manuscript.
L58: “Hodges et al. (2017) used the “ This will be fixed in the revised manuscript.
L85: Please cite studies which assess TCs in past present and future, one example is DOI: 10.3402/tellusa.v64i0.15672 but there is certainly more work which could be cited.
Thank you for this suggestion. We agree that this was misplaced in the discussion, and have elevated it to the literature review and have cited this study. We have also expanded this in section 4.2 in the discussion, especially since it pertains to the interpretation of whether different events may be plausible in a changing climate.
L96: “such as Philip et al. (2022) who derived “. This will be fixed in the revised manuscript.
L99: “who modelled” This will be fixed in the revised manuscript.
L106: For convection permitting models you can cite DOI: 10.1127/0941-2948/2013/0472 We have added this and included in the reference list.
L146 Missing dot This will be fixed in the revised manuscript.
L151: “who argued that scientists “ This will be fixed in the revised manuscript.
L204: It remains unclear how the matching is done. The authors need to be specific about this.
Apologies if this was not clear and thank you for highlighting this. We have specified in section 2.1.3 that the matching is done to IBTrACS observations using the TRACK algorithm published in Hodges et al. (2017). Full details of the tracking is given in Hodges et al (2017) and the matching process as applied to forecasts in Hodges and Emerton (2015). We have also more clearly signposted to the Zenodo dataset record (Hooker et al. 2026).
L204: “. Tropical cyclones” This will be fixed in the revised manuscript.
L209-213: This is a kind of repetition of the paragraph before and again no proper explanation of how the matching is done is presented. We have now combined these paragraphs to remove the repetition and have added the clarifications from above.
Fig. 1: too small. We have now redone the size, quality, and labels for all the figures.
256: Please change methodology to method. This will be fixed in the revised manuscript.
L261: “then the models produce “ This will be fixed in the revised manuscript.
L270: Two sentences for a sub-subsection are not enough, maybe avoid sub-subsections. We have removed these subsections.
Fig.2: Resolution is not sufficient and labels too small. We have now redone the size, quality, and labels for all the figures.
L323-326: This is a repetition. Apologies for this which we had missed, we have compressed these paragraphs and removed the duplicative text.
Fig. 3: too small, low resolution. We have now redone the size, quality, and labels for all the figures.
L360-366: This bullet list contains a lot of speculations and draws conclusions, I suggest avoiding this a move the conclusions to section 5. We have removed the bullet point and clarified the language in all these paragraphs, so they do not draw interpretations of the results. These sections are now shorter as well which we hope helps the readability of the text.
Fig.4,5,6,8 too small, axes labels missing, resolution bad. Thank you for highlighting. We have now redone the size, quality, and labels for all the figures.
L394-399: This bullet list contains a lot of speculations and draws conclusions, I suggest avoiding this a move the conclusions to section 5. Thank you for the suggestion, we have removed the bullet points and rewritten the conclusion as well.
L427-437: This bullet list contains a lot of speculations and draws conclusions, I suggest avoiding this a move the conclusions to section 5. Thank you for the suggestion, we have removed the bullet points and rewritten the conclusion as well.
Fig.7 bad quality. We have now redone the size, quality, and labels for all the figures.
L486-497: This bullet list contains a lot of speculations and draws conclusions, I suggest avoiding this a move the conclusions to section 5. Thank you for the suggestion, we have removed the bullet points and rewritten the conclusion as well.
Fig.9: Is this really needed as a figure, I have the feeling that a description is sufficient. Also is it mm per day ?
Thank you for this suggestion. The figure presents total accumulated rainfall by generated event in the dataset. If the reviewer agrees, we would like to keep it in because we think it continues the red thread of the piece by showing how we could extract scenarios of unprecedented rainfall from a coupled dataset like this one. We have additionally rewritten the section to better explain this angle and hope it alleviates this concern.
L525: “Archer et al. (2024) identified” This will be fixed in the revised manuscript.
Fig.10: axes labels missing in a, (a), (b) labels missing and (b) is unclear, what we see and what the shading means. We have added labels to (a) so that it follows the same format as the other track maps presented above and have also fully redone the flood footprint map to clarify that this is illustrating modelled flood depth from the generated event.
L591: “Kelder et al. (2025) who advocated “ This will be fixed in the revised manuscript.
L639: You may cite DOI: 10.1127/0941-2948/2013/0472 here Thank you for pointing us to this. We will add it to the revised manuscript in the same section.
L646: The publication of Jeffries seems to be quiet important but it is still not accepted, so I suggest to remove submitted publications and find published works which supports your statements. Thank you for this comment. Indeed, we had hoped that this paper would be published by the time the revisions for this manuscript came in but unfortunately that has not happened yet so in the revised manuscript, we have replaced this citation.
L648: The third aim of this study”. This will be fixed in the revised manuscript.
Conclusion: This section is more a summary/abstract than a conclusion, so please draw conclusions. We have fully rewritten the conclusion for your consideration.
L659-662: Avoid asking rhetorical questions, so I suggest removing this paragraph. We have removed this paragraph.
We would like to sincerely thank the reviewer for their time in reading this manuscript and proposing these changes which we hope strengthen the paper. We hope we have properly addressed all suggestions made.
With thanks and best regards,
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-2758-AC1
-
AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Dorothy Heinrich, 16 Sep 2026
-
RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2026-2758', Anonymous Referee #2, 28 Jul 2026
Review of Hurricanes that haven’t happened, yet: Identifying unprecedented tropical cyclone scenarios by Heinrich et al
General comments:
This paper provides a comparison of databases from available tropical cyclone (TC) generation systems with an observed database. The analysis is conducted basin by basin and employs a range of different indicators of tropical cyclone activity. The evaluation of the tropical cyclone generation systems uses a statistical comparison with the statistical moments of the observed distributions. The paper seeks to identify which generation databases are most appropriate in each basin for each indicator in identifying unprecedented tropical cyclone behaviour. The analysis is thorough, the research is novel (perhaps the first systematic comparison of this kind), and the topic is important and appropriate to the journal. My comments are therefore in the 'minor' category. This paper makes an important contribution.
Specific comments:
1. Figures. Many of the figures are too small to be able to discern the details in the figures. This is particularly true of printed copies, but the problem persists for electronic copies -- when increasing the magnification on the electronic copy the fonts and lines tend to just blur in my pdf-reader. This comment could go in the 'technical comments' section below, but it is actually an issue in evaluating the paper, so is included in this section.
2. Observed cyclone dataset uncertainty. The observations here are IBTrACS (this term is used in the abstract but isn't defined there). Since IBTrACS extends from 1851 in some historically very sparsely observed basins (e.g. SP, SI), I would imagine that there are a number of missed systems and missing or poor observations pertaining to some systems. It would be helpful here to provide some indication to the reader how this might affect the results, particularly since IBTrACS is used as a form of truth against which to evaluate the TC generated datasets. For example, divide the IBTrACS dataset in half (first half period, second half period) and compare the statistics of the two samples against one another and against the full period sample. Notable differences could be due to long period variation and sampling, but they could also be due to missing and poor quality data in the first half of the dataset. The reader would like to know if this is potentially important or not, and how it might be allowed for in the comparison with the generated datasets. For example, redo all the comparisons with the generated datasets with just the second half period of the IBTrACS data and report on the differences for the results with the whole IBTrACS period.
3. Moments-based comparisons. The first four statistical moments are used to evaluate and compare the distributions of the sampled generated TCs with the statistics of the observed TCs. It would be helpful here to discuss some of the shortcomings of a moments-based approach for the reader. For example, matching the first few moments of two given distributions does not guarantee that they are the same or have the same shape. The focus on moments makes sense when you are concerned about the tail, but the shape is another important indicator of the distribution which can change the space of plausible outcomes. The statistical comparison would be stronger if you added in another test, such as the KS test, that relates more specifically to the shape of the distribution. The KS test has its limitations too in that it can be insensitive to the tails, but the combination of moments tests and a KS test (e.g. Irving et al. https://doi.org/10.1002/met.2217) provides a more robust overall evaluation with diagnostic information on tail and shape.
4. Section 3.2.5. This section is not like the others. It says that it is a presentation of "work done" elsewhere and seemingly already published "by Archer et al (2024)"? While I understand that rainfall is an important part of the impacts of TCs and wasn't in any of the datasets you analysed til now, I don't think this section adds enough to warrant the disjunction and the implied questions about whose work this is. For example, I was looking at the captions in figures 9 and 10 to see if the figures were from Archer et al., and if not, what was done in this work? Furthermore, figure 10b is a mystery to me; it is mostly black! The caption simply says that it is a "flood footprint map". I have no clue what this is showing me and no idea even if the axis coordinates are latitude and longitude or something else? Since the paper is already long and I have suggested some extensions to the analysis above (points 2 and 3), I suggest deleting this section. You can still note that rainfall and flooding are important impacts from TCs, but are not covered here.
5. Title. The title is in some ways misleading and inconsistent in the first half where it says "Hurricanes that haven't happened, yet". All the TC datasets in the paper are based on TCs that did actually happen. They are then extrapolated into larger samples by statistical or dynamical means. But the point is that they are all framed around events that actually happened. This isn't a problem as such, but this is an important caveat, and the point is somewhat obscured by the first half of the title. The first part of the title is also partly inconsistent in that the body of the paper seems to mostly prefer the more general term 'tropical cyclone' to the more provincial term 'hurricane'. The first half of the title is a nice alliteration, but that nicety should not come at the cost of accuracy in describing the content.
Technical corrections:
6. Figure 2. This figure is needlessly clumsy in that it splits the single SP region box into two boxes (as noted in the caption) due to the longitudes running -180--180. There is no need to introduce this ambiguity around the box regions, since there is no box that spans the 0 longitude line. i.e. the same plot with the longitudes running 0--360 would not split any of the boxes and would be clearer to the reader.
7. In most journals the acronyms need to be defined at first use. I'm not sure if this applies here or to the abstract, but the dataset acronyms are not defined in the abstract.
8. Line 35. The citation to Frank 2003 is recursive/repeated?
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-2758-RC2 -
AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Dorothy Heinrich, 16 Sep 2026
General comments:
This paper provides a comparison of databases from available tropical cyclone (TC) generation systems with an observed database. The analysis is conducted basin by basin and employs a range of different indicators of tropical cyclone activity. The evaluation of the tropical cyclone generation systems uses a statistical comparison with the statistical moments of the observed distributions. The paper seeks to identify which generation databases are most appropriate in each basin for each indicator in identifying unprecedented tropical cyclone behaviour. The analysis is thorough, the research is novel (perhaps the first systematic comparison of this kind), and the topic is important and appropriate to the journal. My comments are therefore in the 'minor' category. This paper makes an important contribution.
Dear reviewer, thank you so much for your encouraging and constructive comments. We really appreciate it. We have addressed all your comments below and made the according changes to the revised manuscript. We would like to particularly thank you for your suggestions to add detail to the results section which we hope have strengthened the relevance of the analysis and the paper's conclusions for a wider audience. As an aside, we also appreciated your use of the phrases “event generation systems” and "moments tests" which we have added through the manuscript as well.
Specific comments:
1. Figures: Many of the figures are too small to be able to discern the details in the figures. This is particularly true of printed copies, but the problem persists for electronic copies -- when increasing the magnification on the electronic copy the fonts and lines tend to just blur in my pdf-reader. This comment could go in the 'technical comments' section below, but it is actually an issue in evaluating the paper, so is included in this section.
Thank you for highlighting this - we agree it was an issue in the original manuscript and apologize. We have updated all of these, made them larger and higher resolution as well as increased the fonts of the labels and axes. We hope this makes the overall paper more accessible and easier to follow the story. As mentioned in response to another reviewer, reflecting on both comments related to the figures and the complexity of interpretation, we have changed how we report the fidelity test results as well. They can now be found reported as coloured matrices in the manuscript, and we suggest to move the full test results (including K-S results and the second IBtrACS period - please see explanation below) to detailed tables in the Supplementary Material.
2. Observed cyclone dataset uncertainty: The observations here are IBTrACS (this term is used in the abstract but isn't defined there). Since IBTrACS extends from 1851 in some historically very sparsely observed basins (e.g. SP, SI), I would imagine that there are a number of missed systems and missing or poor observations pertaining to some systems. It would be helpful here to provide some indication to the reader how this might affect the results, particularly since IBTrACS is used as a form of truth against which to evaluate the TC generated datasets. For example, divide the IBTrACS dataset in half (first half period, second half period) and compare the statistics of the two samples against one another and against the full period sample. Notable differences could be due to long period variation and sampling, but they could also be due to missing and poor quality data in the first half of the dataset. The reader would like to know if this is potentially important or not, and how it might be allowed for in the comparison with the generated datasets. For example, redo all the comparisons with the generated datasets with just the second half period of the IBTrACS data and report on the differences for the results with the whole IBTrACS period.
This is an interesting question which we were curious to answer! We divided IBTrACS into two periods and rerun the analysis using post 1979. However, we found very limited difference in the results of the fidelity tests across the variables and basins so decided not to include these results in the main text of the paper to avoid adding complexity to the text. We have noted this in the methods and results section and have added the full fidelity test tables to the Supplementary Material for any readers interested in exploring the question further.
3. Moments-based comparisons: The first four statistical moments are used to evaluate and compare the distributions of the sampled generated TCs with the statistics of the observed TCs. It would be helpful here to discuss some of the shortcomings of a moments-based approach for the reader. For example, matching the first few moments of two given distributions does not guarantee that they are the same or have the same shape. The focus on moments makes sense when you are concerned about the tail, but the shape is another important indicator of the distribution which can change the space of plausible outcomes. The statistical comparison would be stronger if you added in another test, such as the KS test, that relates more specifically to the shape of the distribution. The KS test has its limitations too in that it can be insensitive to the tails, but the combination of moments tests and a KS test (e.g. Irving et al. https://doi.org/10.1002/met.2217) provides a more robust overall evaluation with diagnostic information on tail and shape.
Thank you for suggesting adding the KS test. We had considered it originally as well, but had ultimately decided to leave out since, as was pointed out here, the main interest for the analysis is those tail events. However, we would like to thank the reviewer for suggesting the paper by Irving et al. (2021) which we had not seen and have read with great interest (a quick note that we also think it is an interesting addition to consider for the UNSeEn methodology more generally as well and would welcome a conversation about this). We have now included the KS tests with the full results in the Supplementary Material and added context to this addition in section 3 for any reader interested in exploring further.
4. Section 3.2.5. This section is not like the others. It says that it is a presentation of "work done" elsewhere and seemingly already published "by Archer et al (2024)"? While I understand that rainfall is an important part of the impacts of TCs and wasn't in any of the datasets you analysed til now, I don't think this section adds enough to warrant the disjunction and the implied questions about whose work this is. For example, I was looking at the captions in figures 9 and 10 to see if the figures were from Archer et al., and if not, what was done in this work? Furthermore, figure 10b is a mystery to me; it is mostly black! The caption simply says that it is a "flood footprint map". I have no clue what this is showing me and no idea even if the axis coordinates are latitude and longitude or something else? Since the paper is already long and I have suggested some extensions to the analysis above (points 2 and 3), I suggest deleting this section. You can still note that rainfall and flooding are important impacts from TCs, but are not covered here.
We apologize for the confusion and thank you very much for bringing this up so we can clarify the situation both in this response and in the text itself. The dataset we presented here is one developed by Archer et al. (2024) but repurposed in a similar way to the other datasets. In Archer et al. (2024), the authors purposefully look at generated events that would not be unprecedented but similar to records set by Hurricane Maria in 2017; in our case, we are interested specifically in the subset of these events that exhibit characteristics that would be beyond these records.
More generally, the point of this section was to highlight that a purely meteorological view on the question of unprecedented tropical cyclones would be limiting, and there are other datasets from other sub-disciplines which may bring have impact-relevant events but are difficult to scale to a global level mostly for computational reasons. We believe this section is needed particularly for the readership of NHESS and helps demonstrate the value of collaboration across tropical cyclone risk disciplines. We have added text to explain this in Section 2.1.3. which we hope helps support our rationale. We have also added this to the discussion section and have updated the figure. We hope this helps better explain what we believe is the value of keeping this section in the paper.
5. Title. The title is in some ways misleading and inconsistent in the first half where it says "Hurricanes that haven't happened, yet". All the TC datasets in the paper are based on TCs that did actually happen. They are then extrapolated into larger samples by statistical or dynamical means. But the point is that they are all framed around events that actually happened. This isn't a problem as such, but this is an important caveat, and the point is somewhat obscured by the first half of the title. The first part of the title is also partly inconsistent in that the body of the paper seems to mostly prefer the more general term 'tropical cyclone' to the more provincial term 'hurricane'. The first half of the title is a nice alliteration, but that nicety should not come at the cost of accuracy in describing the content.
Thank you for highlighting this and for the explanation. Concerns about the first half of the title was also highlighted by another reviewer, and we would propose to remove the second half and make it more precise. In our revised version, we would suggest "Identifying plausible unprecedented tropical cyclone scenarios". We hope the editor and reviewers agree with this change but are very open to other suggestions.
Technical corrections:
6. Figure 2. This figure is needlessly clumsy in that it splits the single SP region box into two boxes (as noted in the caption) due to the longitudes running -180--180. There is no need to introduce this ambiguity around the box regions, since there is no box that spans the 0 longitude line. i.e. the same plot with the longitudes running 0--360 would not split any of the boxes and would be clearer to the reader. Thank you for the suggestion! We have made this change, and the updated figure can now be found in the revised manuscript.
7. In most journals the acronyms need to be defined at first use. I'm not sure if this applies here or to the abstract, but the dataset acronyms are not defined in the abstract. Apologies for this oversight. We will add these acronyms into the abstract.
8. Line 35. The citation to Frank 2003 is recursive/repeated? We will remove this in the revised manuscript.
We hope we have addressed all suggestions as thoroughly as they were proposed and would like to thank the reviewer again for their time and interest in this work!
All the best,
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-2758-AC2
-
AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Dorothy Heinrich, 16 Sep 2026
Viewed
| HTML | XML | Total | BibTeX | EndNote | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 101 | 94 | 14 | 209 | 12 | 15 |
- HTML: 101
- PDF: 94
- XML: 14
- Total: 209
- BibTeX: 12
- EndNote: 15
Viewed (geographical distribution)
| Country | # | Views | % |
|---|
| Total: | 0 |
| HTML: | 0 |
| PDF: | 0 |
| XML: | 0 |
- 1
Summary
The author team uses several datasets to explore different characteristics of unprecedented TC events. Thereby they tested the fidelity of the datasets in realistically representing their most extreme TC events. Further they showed in some examples how the data set can be used, underscoring the opportunity for disaster management.
General
The author team present an interesting study which certainly fits NHESS. Still, the structure lacks clarity and the quality of the figures does not meet the standard for publication. Also, the results are in a stage of the zero-order draft so I recommend major revision.
Major
Minor
Title: The title is a bit repetitive, so I suggest to use the second part: “Identifying unprecedented tropical cyclone scenarios”
L15: TCs can also result in disaster when they are foreseen, so remove “when they are unforeseen”.
Introduction: It is rather uncommon the use subsections in the introduction (except in review articles), please make one flow text.
L58: “Hodges et al. (2017) used the “
L85: Please cite studies which assess TCs in past present and future, one example is DOI: 10.3402/tellusa.v64i0.15672 but there is certainly more work which could be cited.
L96: “such as Philip et al. (2022) who derived “
L99: “who modelled”
L106: For convection permitting models you can cite DOI: 10.1127/0941-2948/2013/0472
L146 Missing dot
L151: “who argued that scientists “
L204: It remains unclear how the matching is done. The authors need to be specific about this.
L204: “. Tropical cyclones”
L209-213: This is a kind of repetition of the paragraph before and again no proper explanation of how the matching is done is presented.
Fig. 1: too small
256: Please change methodology to method.
L261: “then the models produce “
L270: Two sentences for a sub-subsection are not enough, maybe avoid sub-subsections.
Fig.2: Resolution is not sufficient and labels too small.
L323-326: This is a repetition.
Fig. 3: too small, low resolution
L360-366: This bullet list contains a lot of speculations and draws conclusions, I suggest avoiding this a move the conclusions to section 5
Fig.4,5,6,8 too small, axes labels missing, resolution bad.
L394-399: This bullet list contains a lot of speculations and draws conclusions, I suggest avoiding this a move the conclusions to section 5
L427-437: This bullet list contains a lot of speculations and draws conclusions, I suggest avoiding this a move the conclusions to section 5
Fig.7 bad quality
L486-497: This bullet list contains a lot of speculations and draws conclusions, I suggest avoiding this a move the conclusions to section 5
Fig.9: Is this really needed as a figure, I have the feeling that a description is sufficient. Also is it mm per day ?
L525: “Archer et al. (2024) identified”
Fig.10: axes labels missing in a, (a), (b) labels missing and (b) is unclear what we see and what the shading means.
L591: “Kelder et al. (2025) who advocated “
L639: You may cite DOI: 10.1127/0941-2948/2013/0472 here
L646: The publication of Jeffries seems to be quiet important but it is still not accepted, so I suggest to remove submitted publications and find published works which supports your statements.
L648: The third aim of this study”
Conclusion: This section is more a summary/abstract than a conclusion, so please draw conclusions.
L659-662: Avoid asking rhetorical questions, so I suggest removing this paragraph.