date: Sat, 22 Dec 2007 03:23:59 -0000 from: "Earth and Planetary Science Letters" subject: Reviewer Notification of Editor Decision to: Ref: EPSL-D-07-00839 Title: Evidence for Solar Forcing in Variability of Pressures and Temperatures in Europe Article Type: Regular Article Dear Dr. Jones, Thank you once again for reviewing the above-referenced paper. With your help the following final decision has now been reached: Reject The author decision letter and reviewer reports can be found below. We appreciate your time and effort in reviewing this paper and greatly value your assistance as a reviewer for Earth and Planetary Science Letters. If you have not yet activated or completed your 30 days of access to Scopus, you can still access Scopus via this link: http://scopees.elsevier.com/ees_login.asp?journalacronym=EPSL&username=PJones-929 You can use your EES password to access Scopus via the URL above. You can save your 30 days access period, but access will expire 6 months after you accepted to review. Yours sincerely, Rob D. van der Hilst Editor Earth and Planetary Science Letters To: "Vincent Emmanuel Courtillot" courtil@ipgp.jussieu.fr From: hilst-epsl@mit.edu Subject: Your Submission Ms. Ref. No.: EPSL-D-07-00839 Title: Evidence for Solar Forcing in Variability of Pressures and Temperatures in Europe Earth and Planetary Science Letters Dear Vincent, The same reviewers of the "temperatures" paper have also seen this paper. Not surprisingly, the recommendation of the reviewers is the same. Like the revision of the temperature paper that I rejected last July, I am sorry to inform you that also this paper I have decided to reject. Please consider the brief comments below along with those given on the other paper. In one of your e-mails you referred to a paper that is currently under revision for the the Proceedings of the French Academy. Perhaps it is possible to combine the observations presented in these two papers with that one? Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your work. Yours sincerely, Rob D. van der Hilst Editor Earth and Planetary Science Letters Reviewers' comments: Reviewer #1: Review of Blanter et al. - submitted also to EPSL All the review of Le Mouel et al is relevant to this paper, as this has also fallen into the same pitfalls. I would suggest you read Pittock (1983) and also the papers by Brohan et al (2006) and van Loon and Labitzke (1988). The same mistakes as for the other paper have been made, and my recommendation is that this paper also be rejected. A second reason for rejecting this paper (Blanter et al) is that much of the material is the same - very similar sentences and very similar analyses. This paper does have Table 1, though. Here are some specific problems with this paper. As I have said all those for the other paper are also relevant here. 1. There are lots of long daily pressure series for other parts of the world - i.e. beyond Europe. Some long European sources are given in this paper and a long gridded database of daily pressure data (Ansell et al. 2006). Another good source of very long daily European series is this volume (Camuffo and Jones, 2002), which is also a Special Issue volume of Climatic Change. 2. The long-term trend in the green series (Germany) looks wrong in Figure 2. 3. Referencing of the climatological literature is again very superficial. There is a lot of literature on pressure variability across Europe.