Interactive comment on “Estimation of the global inventory of methane hydrates in marine sediments using transfer functions” by E. Piñero et al

The authors develop a parameterization to relate the local inventory of gas hydrate (in g/cmˆ2) to relevant input parameters (like water depth). These parameterizations are tuned to one-dimensional numerical models, which circumvents to the need to run numerical models with gridded data. Another approach is to use the numerical models to construct "look-up" tables for use with gridded data. The second approach eliminates the "parameterization" error that inevitably arises when the results of numerical solutions are fit to a specific parametric function. On the other hand, a transfer function (e.g. a parameterization) is easy to implement once a suitable parametric function is