Climate Change and Impact on Renewable Energies in the Azores Strategic Visions for Sustainability

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article deals with an important and current topic related to renewable energies.

However, the article has flaws that prevent it from being published at present and in the current version. If this version is corrected, the article can be submitted.

The article has flaws in content and form.

Regarding content, it is difficult to find a purpose and an objective for your writing. What, after all, did the authors want to communicate to the scientific community? Remember that an article exists not to report your research, but to report what other researchers can benefit from your research. Therefore, I suggest rewriting it following the classic form: searching databases on a topic, identifying missing points in the research topic, deriving a research gap that will fill one of these missing points, formulating a research question and consequently a purpose for the article and establishing a methodology to achieve the purpose. Then, review the state-of-the-art topics so that the audience can take ownership of what is necessary to understand the article, detail the methodology, present the results, discuss the results, conclude about the results and finally point out the main implications of the results.

As for the form, the article makes use of projections about the future without pointing out which sources guarantee reliability to these projections. Why should I believe these projections? Furthermore, the article accumulates all the exhibits in a single session, which is useless for the audience, as they should support the argument throughout the text. Exhibits do not have a life of their own but play an auxiliary function to support the argument. Finally, the number of references is very small, most are not peer-reviewed, and many of them are in Portuguese, which is useless for the audience of an international journal. To give credibility to an article, it needs to rely on a large amount of credible and exhaustive sources, accessible to the international reader.

It will be an honor to review a new version of your article, this time on a more rigorous basis.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The research tackles the complex problem of the extreme large system concerning the climate change, and its effect on the Earth planet and humans activities.

 The climate changes and their importance are obviously. The authors presented, explained and justified these. 

The research objectives to determine the development recommendations for energy, in the Autonomous Region of the Azores, are well presented and justified too, 

 The paper organization:

Abstract is clear and presents well the content and objectives. The language used in paper is clear and the content is understandable.

Introduction chapter clearly presents the research problem.

Materials and Methods chapter is very succinct. This is based on few references (only 11 for a popular topic). I recommend to add more references and to extend the results comparison.

The choose of the coupled models CMPI6 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Phase 6) for simulation and analysis is correct and it is justified. This software application tool is developed in 2016, trained and verified based on data acquired before this year.  Please provide some information relative to the input data and how the projected results are obtained. 

For increasing the confidence on the simulator, I recommend: the verification of the projection results provided (by CMPI6 using only information acquired before 2016) for Azores Region during the period 2016-2022. What are the differences between the projected values and measured/observed data for this period of time. Please present and analyze them separately for the earlier mentioned period.

The targets represented by hydro, solar and wind are well justified too.

The conclusions are relevant and have high importance values, if the simulator works correctly. They can be used for further industry energy development planning.   

 The figures presented as results are well chosen, and their analysis is correct.  

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The presented article is an overview of the statistical and predictive parameters of the environment of the Azores region. The topic of the article is relevant and may be of interest to specialists and researchers in the fields of climate change and forecasting. The article provides a number of graphs with the change and forecast of various environmental parameters, the authors have done a certain search, however, as critical remarks and important recommendations, several points should be noted:

1. The authors should work with the topic of the work - it must be concretized and clearly formulated.

2. There is no literature review in the article, but it should cover a significant number of sources, which should also be reflected in the list of sources used (it is very small).

3. The volume of work should also be increased with the addition of missing subsections - the purpose of the work, literature review, scientific novelty, discussion and implementation of the results obtained, directions for further research.

4. For a research article, a review of statistical and forecast data is not enough - the authors should significantly strengthen and expand the scientific component of the work. A set of figures and graphs is not enough without a deep study and analysis of the information presented on them.

5. Based on the graphs obtained, what conclusions can be drawn that are consistent with the title of the article? For more voluminous and reliable conclusions, the authors are recommended to consider other statistical sources and forecasts on the subject under consideration, just as well as to consider a larger number of works on the subject under consideration in high-ranking world journals. It is also necessary to indicate in the research work more numerical values ​​in the analysis, discussion and conclusions.

6. The figures themselves should be placed immediately after their mention in the text. Do all the figures used have links, permission to publish (copyright)? The number of figures should be reduced and only the most important ones should be left - some of them are not very informative.

7. What causes significant differences in the forecast values ​​for different scenarios?

8. Authors should pay attention to the design of the article (design of the title, decoding of abbreviations, etc.). Subsection "3.5. Figures, Tables and Schemes" is clearly superfluous - graphic materials should be placed in the work immediately after they are mentioned in the text. The text in lines 295-297 is duplicated. Section "5. Patents" is empty.

9. Authors should pay special attention to the design of the list of sources used. The list of sources is very short.

10. It is also interesting to compare the results obtained by the authors with other results on the subject under consideration - this should also be reflected in the article.

11. The work so far does not look complete - the analysis of the research results in the article is very poorly reflected.

In general, the presented article leaves a positive impression, however, it is not without significant shortcomings. After eliminating these criticisms and taking into account the important recommendations made, the revised article may be re-reviewed for publication in the journal "Sustainability".

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors did not addressed some of the first issues, mainly those regarding exhibits and references. I don’t believe the article has a scientific contribution consistent with the purpose of a top journal.

Author Response

I send responses to R1.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The article revised by the authors looks improved - as a recommendation, the authors should add the subsection "Directions for further research", as well as indicate where and how it is planned to use the results obtained by the authors.

Author Response

I send responses to R3.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

Ok