Direct Versus Indirect Tree Ring Reconstruction of Annual Discharge of Chemora River, Algeria
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I found the manuscript "Direct Versus Indirect Tree-Ring Reconstruction of
Annual Discharge of Chemora River, Algeria" by Meko et al. to be quite clear in both conception and explanation. The analyses seem appropriate and complete and the manuscript is well written and illustrated. Although the "indirect reconstruction" approach did not provide a "better" model of reconstructed streamflow the potential usefulness of the application of this method to other paleo research is clear and I appreciate the work that went into this research.
One question relates to the statement on lines 473-475 noting the potential usefulness of sub-annual ring-width measurements. I am curious whether this is possible in the authors' study region given that the chronologies used are conifers. I don't believe this was covered.
I am also concerned by the fact that the relevant tree-ring chronologies are not available except by request from the authors. I do not believe that this meets "Forests" guidelines for data deposit e.g.,
"In order to maintain the integrity, transparency and reproducibility of research records, authors must make their experimental and research data openly available either by depositing into data repositories or by publishing the data and files as supplementary information in this journal."
The best way to address this issue I believe is to contribute the chronologies to the ITRDB and cite them in the paper.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
On manuscript David Meko, Ramzi Touchan, Dalila Kherchouche, Said Slimani
Direct Versus Indirect Tree-Ring Reconstruction of Annual Discharge of Chemora River, Algeria
General comment
The presented paper is interesting not only because it expands the capabilities of the dendrochronological methods in studying the components of the hydrological cycle of a closed territory, but also because the sequence of analysis is thought out. The authors managed to show that the results obtained are reliable, and the discharge reconstruction performed by them is convincing.
The strength of the research is in the fact that, given the limited initial data for the model, they skillfully and effectively use the entire arsenal of measurements of both water gauge posts and the network of obtained tree-ring chronologies. In terms of thoughtfulness and thoroughness, I can call this work exemplary.
Specific comments:
Lines 102-104: The authors wrote: “Chronologies were standardized by conventional methods designed to emphasize the common growth signal and retain lower frequency climate information”. Taking into account a number of different standardization techniques and widely-spread discussion about most effective way to preserve the common signal in the rings I recommend the authors to clarify the standardization approach used in details.
Lines 443-444, Table 3: The authors wrote: “Mean, median, standard deviation, skew and lag-1 autocorrelation; …” It is better to include “std – standart deviation; skew – skewness; r1 - lag-1 (or first order) autocorrelation”
Lines 553 (Appendix A.2 Water balance modeling): In the section the authors described the WB model in details. This model contains a number of parameters. How did the authors estimate values of parameters? What were criteria or parameterization procedure to choose the values? For my opinion the using of more sophisticated parameterization procedure can improve the accuracy of water balance modeling and therefore to make indirect reconstruction better.
Lines 660: The authors wrote: “The procedure is described here with matrix algebra…” Such algebra is very convenient to describe different algorithms in theory. Does it mean that the specialized software in the work also uses matrix calculations to improve significantly the rate of calculations?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
