Comparison of Approaches for Irrigation Scheduling Using AquaCrop and NSGA-III Models under Climate Uncertainty

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript presents a relevant issue in the irrigation domain and exposes it in clear way. I would only suggest minor changes to further improve the readability of the paper.

The introduction clearly justifies the interest of combining a crop model with an optimization algorithm. However, the introduction cites other authors that have dealt it as a single-objective optimization and does not clarify why the authors consider irrigation optimization a case of multi-objective optimization. In particular, it does not introduce which are the multiple objectives that the authors consider that should be considered for irrigation optimization. This omission is solved later, by page 7, after seeing Figure 1 and reading the Material and Methods section 2.6. Given that multi-objective optimization of irrigation is a key contribution of this manuscript I propose to emphasize it, by including a sentence in the introduction, at least introducing which are those multiple objectives (NB, WUE and R). Also, it would be worth to disclose these objectives of optimization in the abstract.

 

Figure 4 and Figure 7. A range of 0-55 mm for the scale of Irrigation axis would make it clearer that the plotted values are 50 mm and not a larger truncated value.

 

Figure 6. The caption should be improved for clarity. The text in lines 405-406 explains what is illustrated in this figure better than the caption.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

They must simplify the presentation of the model in order to make it more understandable for the reader of this magazine. The model is presented in a very mathematical way which makes it difficult to read the text for those who do not know the model. Knowledge of the model but how the simulation was performed will be more interesting and how the values were measured will be more interesting

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The intent of this study is good. The paper is fairly well-written. However, the following comments may further enhance the readability of this manuscript:

1. What is the meaning of “huge solution space in Line 39?
2. The introduction section is too lengthy and consists of too much literature review (over-referenced). Thus, there are too many unnecessary references.
3. The last few sentences in the introduction section include descriptive of methodology and significant results, which is very odd.
4. What is “x” in equations 2 and 3? Is it ‘multiplication”?
5. Be sure to define each and every variable listed in all the equations. But, variable definitions do not have to be repeated.
6. Reference citations in the text with more than 2 authors must use “et al.” instead.
7. Please unify the use of “NSGAII” and “NSGA-II”.
8. Acronym names such as ET₀ should be defined when first appear.
9. What is the parenthesis in equation 7?
10. Please define “RMB”.
11. The brand and specification of the computer used is not that necessary.
12. Annotations (horizontal axis, Date) of some of the figures are not clear.
13. The reasoning for the large dip in WUE for Approach 3 in Figure 3 has not been discussed.
14. The scaling for vertical axis in Figures 5 and 6 is not appropriate to show the treatment differences.
15. Discussions based on various previous, other study results which may have been conducted under different experimental conditions may not that supportive of the current study validity and accuracy.
16. This study does not include a conclusion and study implications or practical applications. It may be “mis-classified” as a scientific technical report.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors developed the work better and tried to meet the criticisms. I believe that the work has had significant improvements

Reviewer 3 Report

A great job in modifying the original manuscript according to my previous comments. You all deserve a round of applause!