Large-Eddy Simulation of Wind Turbine Wakes in Forest Terrain
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors,
I want to congratulate you for a work well structured, easy to understand and read, with a really good introduction and a good reference work. The topic is very interesting, the aim of the paper and how it was implemented are clear, and the provided information is informative. I have some comments in detail listed below to help improving this article.
· What are the limitations of this study? What would be the next step to improve this study?
· In order to help the readers better understand the methodology of the conducted research, the authors should devise a flowchart, a flowchart that depicts the steps that the authors have processed in developing their research and most important of all, the final target. This flowchart will facilitate the understanding of the proposed approach and in the same time will make the article more interesting to the readers
Author Response
Please find our responses in the attached file.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Large-Eddy Simulation of Wind Turbine Wakes in Forest Terrain
I would like to thank the authors for the quality research and congratulate the authors on a well-prepared article.
My comments are as follows:
1. The analysis and results in this manuscript are satisfactory and acceptable for publication. There are minor spelling and grammar errors in the manuscript. Please fix.
2. The abstract and conclusion sections have some overlap in text, please fix it.
3. Please give more detail about Figure 22.
4. The literature review should be enhanced with more recent research papers on the field of interest, please try to add more recent publications.
Author Response
Please find our responses in the attached file.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper takes up large-eddy simulation of wind turbine wakes in forest terrain. The authors analyzed nine cases were carried out with different vertical distributions of leaf area density (LAD) and values of leaf area index (LAI). They stated, among others, that the wind turbine wake in forest canopy is featured by a faster wake recovery when compared with the flat terrain, and the LAI is found to have an impact greater than the vertical distribution of LAD.
The authors presented the obtained results in an interesting way.
In my opinion, the paper can be publish in Sustainability, after linguistic verification.
Author Response
Please find our responses in the attached file.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
The authors of this paper have numerically investigated the effectf forest canopy has on the wakes behind a wind turbine and this for different canopy configurations They used a very powerful model, namely LES, to capture the turbulence. The paper is well presented and written and the results are thoroughly discussed
We recommend the paper for publication after looking at the following remarks :
1- The authors should the purpose of studying the wake for such a system and the impact it might have on improving existing design or design innovating
2- The authors used the dynamics smagorinsky model to capture the smaller scales discarded by the filtering operation. The use of such model might be justified if authors show that it performs better than the concevntional one.
3- The authors should give more evidence on why they think the resolution chosen for their system is enough to capture the flow physics (information on the non dimensional cell size near the walls is missing )
Author Response
Please find our responses in the attached file.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
