A sea surface temperature reconstruction for the southern Indian Ocean trade
wind belt from corals in Rodrigues Island (19° S, 63° E)

Zinke, Jens; Reuning, Lars; Pfeiffer, Miriam; Wassenburg, Jasper A.; Hardman, Emily; Jhangeer-Khan, Reshad; Davies, Gareth R.; Ng, Curtise K. C.; Kroon, Dick

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-13-5827-2016

Articles | Volume 13, issue 20

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-13-5827-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-13-5827-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 20

Research article

|

25 Oct 2016

Research article |

| 25 Oct 2016

A sea surface temperature reconstruction for the southern Indian Ocean trade wind belt from corals in Rodrigues Island (19° S, 63° E)

Jens Zinke, Lars Reuning, Miriam Pfeiffer, Jasper A. Wassenburg, Emily Hardman, Reshad Jhangeer-Khan, Gareth R. Davies, Curtise K. C. Ng, and Dick Kroon

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Final revised paper (published on 25 Oct 2016)
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Preprint (discussion started on 03 Mar 2016)
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Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Review Zinke et al', Anonymous Referee #1, 06 Apr 2016
RC2: 'RC2 comment', Anonymous Referee #2, 03 May 2016
AC1: 'Response to Reviewer comments', Jens Zinke, 27 May 2016

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (06 Jun 2016) by Aldo Shemesh

AR by Svenja Lange on behalf of the Authors (17 Aug 2016) Author's response

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (18 Aug 2016) by Aldo Shemesh

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (02 Sep 2016)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

General comments:
The authors have substantially revised the original manuscript in response to comments from myself and another review. In general this has made the manuscript more accessible to the readers. I did, however, become confused with material in the Appendix and Supplementary Material and would strongly recommend that these be combined into a single Supplementary Material file. I still have a few areas which need some minor attention/clarification – see below.

Specific comments:
Line 62: ‘Synchronously’
Line 64: Figure 1b referenced but Figure 1a should come first.
Line 92: ‘coral paleo-thermometers’
Line 93: ‘alteration’
Line 99: ‘Subtropical’
Line 154: ‘occurring mostly’
Line 176: ‘Fig. 1a’
Line 176-177: ‘colony’
Line 179: ‘August 2005 from a colony on the………….’
Line 181: ‘March 2007 from a colony growing……..’
Line 191: ‘Figs. A4 and A5’ – should be relabelled/re-ordered in SM as Fig. A1 and Fig. A2 – as first occurrence in text.
• OK just realised my confusion between material presented in an Appendix and Supplementary material. Should these not be combined into one Supplementary Material file to prevent other readers being similarly confused.
Line 191: ‘coral density was calculated’
Line 196: ‘samples for geochemical analysis’
Lines 202-204: ‘Corals that showed an…………..’; given there are only 2 corals, do the authors mean sections of corals?
Line 271-208: ‘along the geochemical sampling tracks’
Line 221: ‘was dissolved’
Line 222: ‘was diluted’
Line 250: ‘extracted various SST and….’
Line 251: ‘for comparison with’
Line 257: HadISST is not listed in Table A1
Line 264: HadSST3 also not listed in Table A1
Line 269: HadMAT1 and HadnMAT2 not listed in Table A1
Line 273: Section 3 Materials and Methods should also include a description of the statistical analyses undertaken; the section should also include the description and data sources of the climate indices used (e.g. SIOD, PDO, ENSO) and other proxy coral records used.
Line 282: ‘between the two colonies’
Line 283: As Figure 2a presents Sr/Ca monthly anomalies, it is not possible to see the ‘distinct seasonality’ referred to in the text.
Line 288: anomalies ‘higher’ than what?
Line 291: ‘seasonality’ not evident in Fig. 2a
Lines 309-310: Figure 4 does not show a radiograph
Line 312: ‘and therefore the reported…’
Lines 334-335: Explain why just these 3 data sets were used for calibration.
Lines 351-406: Section 5.4 – I still find this section extremely hard to follow and identify the key findings of the authors.
Line 406: I think that part of section 6.1 should appear in the Results rather than the Discussion. Need to clearly separate the findings of the study from discussing their implications etc.
Line 410: Reference to Figures 7 and 8 in text before Figure 6.
Line 415: ‘shows significant positive’; elsewhere referring to correlations indicated whether significant.
Lines 436-437: Figure 9 does not appear to show the Reunion Island record referred to.
Line 478: First reference to Figure 6 in text!
Line 481: ‘very low overall density’ – compared to what?
Line 506: ‘new cores need to be obtained………’
Line 844: ‘density’
Line 989: ‘inverted’ rather than’ converted’
Lines 1000-1009: Please clarify labelling and caption to make it clear to reader which core sample is represented in each panel (e.g. Totor or Cabri).
Line 1030: How was this image of the coral core obtained? Is it under UV light?
Pages 54 and 55: Are these really positive X-ray prints, they look more like X-ray negatives?

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (29 Sep 2016) by Aldo Shemesh

AR by Jens Zinke on behalf of the Authors (05 Oct 2016) Author's response Manuscript

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Short summary

Our work provides a new coral proxy-based reconstruction of sea surface temperature (SST) from the coral reefs of Rodrigues Island, located in the poorly studied south-central Indian Ocean trade wind belt. This site is well located to study the SST history of the subtropical Indian Ocean and its teleconnections with the Pacific over long timescales. Our results provide insights into biases in coral Sr / Ca-based SST reconstructions and how to avoid them.

A sea surface temperature reconstruction for the southern Indian Ocean trade wind belt from corals in Rodrigues Island (19° S, 63° E)

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Interactive discussion

Peer-review completion

A sea surface temperature reconstruction for the southern Indian Ocean trade wind belt from corals in Rodrigues Island (19° S, 63° E)