This paper has been revised, with some improvements. The principle one is the use of the model to do a scaling up analysis of lab to field - which helps to understand what the Metronome can and cannot say about natural estuaries.
That said, the authors did not address my major concerns. A few important points here:
1. I do not object to a Methods paper, and am fully aware that ESurf publishes Methods papers.
2. Any paper should be Novel.
The authors spill a fair bit of ink countering my objections in their rebuttal letter but they misrepresent them. They indicate that I think ESurf shouldn't publish Methods papers, and then they address the novelty issue in isolation; but the two are related. My main point is that, if it is a Methods paper, the method should be novel. And, in this case, it isn't: a smaller scale Metronome already exists and has been published on. So then, if it's a Science paper, there should be novel scientific conclusions. But, there aren't really - although the situation has improved a bit with this version. So this paper STILL occupies an uncomfortable middle ground.
Perhaps I need to be more direct here so that I am not misunderstood.
1. This is a bigger version of a previous experiment. Does it capture qualitatively new behaviors from the smaller one? Or, put another way, why make it bigger?
2. (related) There is a scaling up comparison from the Metronome to the field. How about from the Metronome to the previous smaller experiment?
3. I still think there is a little too much self citation here, but I accept that this is subjective. I do not wish to go through case by case and suggest specific other papers; if the authors believe that theirs are the best, fine.
4. The intro states that the experiment is described so others could reproduce it. There has been little done since the previous version to describe the methods more fully, and access by others to data and materials associated with this paper is to be done by request from one of the authors. Again, this seems not too accessible as a Methods paper. |