Comment on Modelling a coastal ridging event over south-eastern Australia C. J. C. Reason and P. L. Jackson (Meteorological Applications 2002, 9: 383-397)

Extract

We noted with interest the recent article by Reason & Jackson, which presented a modelling case study of the coastal ridging that occurs along the south-eastern coast of Australia. As the authors and others have pointed out, coastal ridging is a dominant feature of the weather over this region in the warmer months, and also occurs with varying degrees of regularity in other parts of the world. The paper by Reason & Jackson draws to some extent on an earlier publication of ours on the same topic (Speer & Leslie, 1997) and we would like the authors to respond to our comments on a number of alternative interpretations we appear to have of case study they chose. We offer our comments because the topic area is vital to the understanding and prediction of a significant component of the weather over the most populous part of the Australian continent. To that end, we feel that an exchange of views would be of considerable interest to readers of Meteorological Applications, particularly as we and the authors have generated a significant fraction of the published work on this topic, especially for southeastern Australia.