date: Mon Jul 3 13:10:50 2000 from: Tim Osborn subject: Re: Paper to: Mat Collins At 11:15 03/07/00 +0100, you wrote: >I'd quite like to get our tree-ring paper submitted somewhere (e.g. >Climate Dynamics or J. Climate). Do you think we need another iteration? >Simon and John Mitchell seem to be happy with it as it is so we could just >send it off and wait for the reviewers comments before making any further >changes. Otherwise we need to get Simon and Keith to read it again and >make comments which could take several months. Let me know what you think. Mat I'd been thinking about this on Friday actually, because - at long last! - the paper describing the age-banded reconstructions has been submitted (to JGR), and the paper describing the hugershoff-standardised reconstructions (that I began drafting in May 99) has been sent to co-authors for comments, and if they're happy with it, it will be sumitted to The Holocene next Monday. This is all Keith wanted to wait for, so I guess we can go ahead. I was having a critical look through the manuscript, to try to anticipate things that the reviewers might complain about. I came up with two concerns: (1) Should we have only used the pre-1900 part of the tree-ring reconstructions to assess natural variability, to avoid the early 20th century warming and the tree-ring decline post-1960? It's a question of balancing record length with avoiding non-natural or non-temperature changes. I think we could certainly argue against avoiding the early 20th century warming, as this is unlikely to be only (or even mainly) anthropogenic. Do we need to add a sentence to pre-empt the referees? (2) The model regional averages were computed from all land grid boxes in each region (I think). The reconstructions were based on the tree sites shown on the map, calibrated against regional temperatures averaged across all grid boxes with tree sites in them or with tree sites in an adjacent box (when the temperature series were short or missing in the same box). This is fine, I think, for most regions (and NH), but for TIBP and CAS one might expect the tree-ring-based reconstructions to have more variability than the model purely because of the small data coverage in the former. Do you want to do anything about this? The ECCA region is also a worry for the same reason. Let me know what you think about these points. Also, is the wait for a new front cover for HCTNs over, and is the paper now a technical note? If so, what number? Finally, let me know if you want copies of the submitted versions of the two tree-ring papers. Cheers Tim