Articulating the rationale for the potential uses of the emulators will maximise usability and avoid mis-use
2020
The study is a step forward in crop model emulation and is in principle a useful contribution to the literature.The paper contains a lot of excellent technical work.I focus here on areas for improvement, which I describe as major simply because I think a re-framing is needed in order to ensure that the paper is used well, and is not mis-used in the future.The uses stated in the abstract for the emulators are: "providing a tool that can facilitate model comparison, diagnosis of interacting factors affecting yields, and integrated assessment of climate impacts."It would be good to understand more from the paper about how these different usages are envisaged.In particular, the suggestion that the Printer-friendly version Discussion paper