Many thanks for taking the time to read and comment on my work, the handling editor(s) have so far found it difficult to find anyone else to do so in the short timescale first suggested.  Thanks also for the opportunity to encourage more technical discussion across our community.  I selected WES to disseminate these valuable industry application focused results, because the public peer review mechanism resonated with my wider effects to promote discussion across the wind energy community.  This has not been successful so far.  Perhaps the relatively small number of industry practitioners who recognise the benefits of this applied research have been too busy with operational projects to participate in the online review process.  I encourage them to do so while there is still time.  I therefore request an extension to the public discussion period, while I also begin to explore other journal options.

Considerable effort has been made to prepare the manuscript according to WES conventions and secure permission to publish these proprietary results from six major offshore wind energy developers.  So, I hope the editors can still consider publication within WES.  There is no option for doing much more work for this paper, the objective is to share useful results from an already complete proprietary study.  Publication of any additional extracts from the Joint Industry Project would need to be approved by all six participants, which would be time consuming.  I can understand why an academic might consider the manuscript to be like a technical note.  Indeed, I am not a pure academic, I am an industry practitioner.  I do not get paid for the time required to work on this paper.  I have offered WES the opportunity to share these results, but will of course accept the editor’s decision.  This may be the wrong journal for such engagement between industry and academia.  If so, I would be grateful for suggestions of suitable alternative journals.

In specific response to the three points raised:

1.  I am surprised you suggest rejection due to insufficient scientific quality, as the handling editor(s) evaluated this before releasing into public review.  The essential background theory is already well covered by the two textbooks I cited.  There is no need to duplicate this in an already extensive paper.  The IEC and ISO relationships are also already well documented in the corresponding standards and widely used, but to my knowledge not brought together in this way before, then evaluated using most available relevant measured data.  The journal encourages a multidisciplinary approach, but this reviewer has apparently not recognised these original contributions to the wind energy community.  The journal invites concise narratives which I have strived to provide, including application focused discussion throughout.  I believe I have already included every reference needed to support the narrative, but would be happy to consider any specific suggestions that the reviewer thinks are missing.

2.  The reviewer has misinterpreted this point.  LiDAR data are not included because the focus of this already extensive study is on met mast data.  I am not saying that all LiDAR data are unreliable at high wind speeds, just that they need to be treated with caution, in accord with scientific and engineering best practices.  Of course LiDAR is needed for wind profiles above the height of met masts.  The paper recognises this, but it could perhaps be made a little clearer.  This is not a valid reason to reject an extensive detailed analysis of met mast data, which still provide the only widely trusted measure of turbulence intensity.  Furthermore, quantifying shear in the lower 100m is critical for relating winds within the turbine blade swept area to near surface winds.  These are essential to understand other metocean processes, including waves and surface currents.  The paper provides valuable assessment of industry standard relationships, widely used by practitioners for estimation of extreme wind conditions over these heights.

3.  As noted above, this paper is disseminating results from an already complete proprietary study with permission from all six major industry participants.  These results are of practical value as they presently stand, with further statistical analysis beyond the scope of this already extensive study.  The focussed discussion and conclusions section attempts to makes this clear.  This paper may assist other practitioners or researchers to conduct further related study on the mainly public domain data.  It is not a requirement of the WES journal to include application of machine learning techniques.

I believe I have convincingly rebutted all three reasons given by this anonymous reviewer for rejection of this manuscript.  I hope the journal editors will give this due consideration, but of course I will respect their decision.

Many thanks for sharing these comments George.  There are few metocean perspectives in the community with such authority.  As lead author of the planned companion paper, your views on appropriate journal for our work are a key consideration.  Fortunately, there has been much more balanced discussion here since the first invited formal review.

Many thanks for making the time to provide these comments Ian.  Your perspective as a very experienced metocean practitioner, busy working on this subject matter for many offshore wind energy projects, is very important.  I look forward to discussing further beyond this medium.

I’m delighted that you could find time to carefully review and comment on this paper Remi.  Your very active and widely respected wind resource perspective is exactly the type of discussion I was hoping to encourage!  You raise very good points that the primary focus of this paper is on strong winds and that it could be shorter.  I will not respond to your specific suggestions further here.  I will also seek views from other relevant colleagues, importantly the ENOW participants who approved release of this publication.  Hopefully you and I can both help encourage wider discussion of related relevant topics in future WRM meetings, now these results are public domain.

I’m very pleased to see that your detailed community comment has been upgraded to a formal review Remi.