The Movement of GPS Positioning Discrepancy Clouds at a Mid-Latitude Region in March 2015

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 3)

The improved version of the manuscript is suitable for publication. I would like to commend the authors for the effort they put into the research and congratulate them on its publication.

Date of the response:
29th March 2023

Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

Reviewer’s comments to the revised paper by Balodis at al.

The authors have changed the text substantially. They have briefed a complicated mathematics and made some other changes. I think that the paper could be published as it is now.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Reviewer comments to the paper by Balodis et al. “The movement of…”

 

It is widely known that the ionosphere is changing dramatically during and prior to geomagnetic storms.  Critical frequency of the F2 layer according to VS observations and the total electron content (TEC) values are the parameters used most often for analyzing the storm and prestorm effects in the ionosphere. The authors propose to use perturbations in the GPS positioning system observed at Latvian stations for similar analysis. The strong magnetic storm on March 17, 2015 is analyzed, as well as the situation during the entire March 2015.

The authors introduce the term “GPS positioning discrepancy clouds” while analyzing the nature of disturbances in the position determination results. Sets of simultaneously occurred discrepancies over the network of stations are named as discrepancy clouds.

The idea of introducing a new set of ionospheric perturbations to study the ionospheric effects of geomagnetic storms seems fruitful.

As far as I was able to understand, the main result of the study is that the mean error (per station) in the position determination is higher on the storm days than on the other days of March 2015.

However, the paper under review is in my mind badly organized. It is overloaded by figures and the latter are not easy to understand. I am not sure that the complicated mathematics in Section 2 actually is pertinent in the paper aimed to space weather effects in the ionospheric behavior.

I can not recommend publication of the paper in its current form and think that it should be rewritten in a more clear form. There should be more plain words describing introduced terms and parameters.

Some errors

The sentence in the Abstract “Total Electron Content (TEC) and Rate Of change of TEC Index (ROTI) relations, as well as discrep…” needs a verb.  

In the first sentence in 2.1, there should be Fig.4 but not Fig.3,

 

In the next paragraph, there should be Figure 5, not Figure 4.

 

The language is understanding, but attention of a language editor is desirable.  

Reviewer 2 Report

The article is interesting, readable, does not contain unnecessary texts.

The introduction is specific, it describes the studied issue well. Only the last paragraph resembles a conclusion rather than an introduction.

Equations are something between mathematics and the python programming language. The comprehensibility of some parts would benefit from their more thorough commenting or breaking down into sentences - especially (2), (3), (4), (5).

The conclusion is based on a list of established facts. Perhaps it would be appropriate to comment on them more.

Links are used in the correct volume. But [3], [6] and [29] lack complete citations.

A few minor comments:

-at the beginning of the third paragraph, a space is missing after [3]

-end of the eighth paragraph: what does 24 Solar Cycle 24 mean? One "24" is apparently redundant.

-at the beginning of paragraph 2.1 there should be a reference to Figure 4 and not to Figure 3, in the next paragraph there should be a reference to Figure 5 and not to Figure 4.

-Figure 13: parts of the picture are not next to each other but below each other

-Figure 15: on x axis are days but not hours, so it's unreadable

Reviewer 3 Report

The revision is in the attachment.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf