date: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:58:11 -0500 (EST)
from: weather@wiley.co.uk
subject: Weather - Decision on Manuscript ID WEA-09-0001.R2
to: p.jones@uea.ac.uk

27-Feb-2009

Dear Dr. Jones,

Thank you for submitting your reviosed manuscript ID WEA-09-0001.R2 entitled "The Urban Heat Island in Central London and urban-related warming trends in Central London since 1900". It is early days for me as editor and my preferred policy is to send papers out to two reviewers and trust their judgment, only getting involved myself if there is disagreement. In this case, since you chose not to respond to the further comments of the second reviewer, and he was clearly a little unhappy with the ‘feel’ of the article, I thought I ought to read it through carefully and make my own assessment. I regret to have to say that the result is a more critical review.

I immediately balked at your statement: ‘the purpose of this study is… to show.. that the magnitude of the UHI for central London is nnot increasing’. You surely do not mean that: your purpose is to study the data and see what conclusions can be drawn.

In the second paragraph, at proof-reading stage I would have changed ‘warmer’ in the third line to ‘higher’; as I was long ago taught, temperature is a neutral concept. Later in the article you refer at several points to temperature differences in °C, when it should be in degC.

There are problems with the Kew and LWC sets. The Kew Observatory data bank is, I believe, based on a standard exposure screen brought into use in its closing years to provide overlap and enable all the long-period record (when readings were taken in a screen situated on the north-wall of the building) to be corrected.  So care is needed in these results, especially going from pre-1980 corrected Observatory data to later Gardens data. You mention only in a small footnote at the end the three different sites for LWC (I think the Kingsway site was in use long before 1959?).  These sites are all highly non-standard, and really should not be used in any serious climatological study (I can hear Philip Eden screaming as I type!). I do not think you can credibly make the comment (page 6), that the ‘LWC site would have been 0.5 deg warmer than the CAM site’: quite apart from anything else, which LWC site? In the text you do actually at several points infer there is just one LWC site; having worked at and read the thermometers at both High Holborn and Clerkenwell (and, incidentally, at Kew Observatory), my view would be that any accurate correlation between the two data sets would be unlikely (the former was, arguably, a better site than the latter).

I think you can still come to the broad conclusions that you do, but using ‘SJP’, and not LWC. Accordingly, I would ask you to redraft the article accordingly, noting also the more minor (but not insignificant) points I raised above. A revised version of your manuscript will be reconsidered for publication. Please only respond to the email address at the head of this message.

You can upload your revised manuscript and submit it through your Author Center. Log into http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/weather   and enter your Author Center, where you will find your manuscript title listed under "Manuscripts with Decisions".

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Once again, thank you for submitting your manuscript to Weather and I look forward to receiving your revision.


Yours sincerely,

Mr. BOB PRICHARD
Editor, Weather
weather@wiley.co.uk