the-cryosphere - SKILL.md Agent Skill

name: the-cryosphere description: Use when targeting The Cryosphere (TC) or deciding whether a snow, ice, glacier, permafrost, or sea-ice manuscript fits this EGU open-access venue with interactive public peer review. Encodes the journal's fit, framing, method-and-evidence bar, house style, official-submission re-check, and desk-reject heuristics.

The Cryosphere (the-cryosphere)

Journal positioning

The Cryosphere is an open-access European Geosciences Union (EGU) journal, published by Copernicus, and is the disciplinary journal of record for the frozen components of the Earth system — snow, land and sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets, ice shelves, permafrost, and frozen ground. Its defining character is the EGU interactive public peer-review model: a submitted manuscript is posted as a preprint in the discussion forum (EGUsphere), where named referee comments and open community comments appear publicly alongside the authors' responses before a final acceptance decision. The journal rewards complete, rigorous cryospheric studies — observational, remote-sensing, modeling, or theoretical — addressed to the specialist cryosphere community, and values transparency and reproducibility as part of the process, not only the product. This skill is a fit / venue-selection / re-framing tool. It does not replace the journal's current official submission guidelines. Before submitting, re-check the live author instructions on the EGU/Copernicus The Cryosphere site.

When to trigger

The author names The Cryosphere as the target for a complete study of snow, ice, glaciers, ice sheets, sea ice, or permafrost.
A manuscript reports cryospheric observations, remote sensing, or modeling with enough depth for full treatment, and the author is choosing between The Cryosphere and Geophysical Research Letters or JGR-Atmospheres.
An author specifically wants — or needs to prepare for — the EGU interactive public peer-review process with public preprint and open referee discussion.
The author needs The Cryosphere's open-access terms, data policy, and discussion-stage expectations, plus desk-reject criteria, before submission.

Scope & topic fit

Glaciers and ice sheets: mass balance, dynamics, ice-flow modeling, calving, subglacial processes, and ice-sheet contribution to sea level.
Sea ice: extent, thickness, drift, deformation, sea-ice modeling, and ice-ocean-atmosphere interactions.
Snow: snowpack physics, snow cover, snow-hydrology, albedo, and snow remote sensing.
Permafrost and frozen ground: thermal state, active-layer dynamics, ground ice, and permafrost-carbon feedbacks.
Ice shelves, icebergs, river and lake ice, and other cryospheric features at process or system level.
Cryospheric methods: new remote-sensing retrievals, field techniques, or model developments delivering a quantitative result, including paleo-cryosphere reconstructions.

Method & evidence bar

The study must be complete and rigorous: full methods, validation against independent data or established models, and explicit uncertainty quantification.
Remote-sensing studies must document the sensor, retrieval, and error budget; field studies must address measurement uncertainty and spatial representativeness.
Model studies require evaluation against observations and a clear account of sensitivity to key parameters, forcing, and assumptions.
Because peer review is public, the manuscript must be self-contained and defensible in an open forum: methods transparent, claims calibrated to the evidence, and limitations acknowledged.
Data and code must be deposited in a FAIR repository (e.g., Zenodo, PANGAEA) with persistent identifiers and cited; Copernicus enforces data and code availability, and assets should be accessible during the open discussion.
Reanalysis or satellite-product use must justify suitability and document version and processing level.

Structure & house style

The Cryosphere uses a standard full-length structure: Abstract, Introduction, Data/Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusions, with full references and a mandatory data/code-availability section.
The manuscript is published as a preprint in EGUsphere at the discussion stage; write it to stand as a citable public document and to withstand open referee and community comment.
Length follows completeness; Copernicus does not impose tight length caps, but every section must be justified and concise.
Figures must be publication-quality, quantitative, and individually informative; supplementary material carries extended analyses.
Methods must be reproducible from the main text or supplement, including model versions, forcing datasets, and processing steps.
Author contributions, competing interests, and the data/code-availability statement are required sections under Copernicus policy.

Official-submission checklist

Before giving submission-ready advice, read ../../resources/source-basis.md and ../../resources/official-source-map.md; start from the official source anchors for this journal family, then cite the current journal-specific page you checked.
Search the live site for "The Cryosphere submission author guidelines" and follow the current EGU/Copernicus version.
Re-check the interactive public peer-review workflow: preprint posting in EGUsphere, the discussion phase, referee and community comment handling, and revision stages.
Re-check Copernicus data and software availability policy; confirm accepted FAIR repositories and that assets are accessible during open discussion.
Re-check open-access terms and article-processing charges, plus competing-interests, author-contributions, funding, and AI-use disclosure requirements.
If the live official instructions conflict with this skill, the official instructions win.

Pre-submission self-check

One sentence — the cryospheric process advanced and the quantitative result that defines the contribution.
Methods, model versions, and datasets are fully specified and reproducible from the paper plus supplement.
Validation against independent data or models is included, with explicit uncertainty quantification.
The manuscript is self-contained and defensible in open, public peer review with named and community comments.
Data and code are deposited in a FAIR repository with persistent identifiers and are accessible during discussion.
The paper is positioned against recent The Cryosphere literature on this process.

Common desk-reject triggers

A short, single-result finding better suited to a rapid letter, lacking the depth a full study requires.
A modeling study with no evaluation against observations and no sensitivity analysis.
A descriptive field or remote-sensing report without uncertainty characterization or a generalizable cryospheric result.
Missing or non-compliant data/code-availability statement, or assets not accessible during the open discussion phase.
A manuscript not robust enough to withstand public referee and community comment — overclaimed, under-validated, or non-transparent.

Re-routing decision

Short, high-impact, broad-interest cryospheric finding needing rapid publication: geophysical-research-letters.
Atmospheric-process emphasis (snow-atmosphere, ice-atmosphere) better suited to a full atmospheric venue: journal-of-geophysical-research-atmospheres.
Broad cross-disciplinary geoscience significance beyond the cryosphere: Nature Geoscience or a high-impact generalist venue.
Sea-level or Earth-system-futures framing centered on human-Earth trajectories: earths-future.

Output format

[Fit] High / Medium / Low (one-line reason)
[Target] The Cryosphere
[Topic tags] <2–3 closest topics>
[Method/evidence] <is the study complete — full methods, validation, explicit uncertainty — and defensible in open public peer review?>
[Top risk] <the single most likely reason for rejection>
[Official items to re-check] <interactive public peer review / data-code availability / open-access & APC / disclosure / preprint (EGUsphere) handling>
[Re-route suggestion] <if not a fit, a better-matched venue>