Interference of Meteorological Variables on Night Sky Observation in Rural and Urban Zones of South-Western Spain

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1. What are the research hypotheses?

2. There are no sources given under the pictures.

3. 31 items of literature is not enough, please complete at least 40 items.

4. The conclusions  should include verification of the research hypotheses presented in the article.

 

 

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Alejandro Martínez-Martín et al. analyzed the influence of meteorological variables on the darkness level in the rural areas and urban areas of southwestern Spain. In the manuscript, some parts are not rigorous or clear enough. The comments are as the followings:

1.     L13: Add the full name of ALAN where it first appears.

2.     L20: Add the full name of NSB.

3.     L20-22, L23-24: Are the results significant? What is the confidence interval? Add an explanation in the manuscript.

4.     L43-46: It seems that the knowledge in these sentences is not found in this study. Please add citations here. Similar problems can be also found in L47-50, L54-63, L80-83,…. It is a severe problem for a scientific article. Please carefully go through the whole paper sentence by sentence, and add citations to all the sentences with knowledge from previous studies.

5.     L52: “Climatic phenomena are random events”. It seems that this sentence is not rigorous enough. Although climates may change drastically, some climatic phenomena are relatively steady and predictable. So, they are not totally random. Therefore, please rewrite the sentence, and add citations.

6.     L64-65: It would be better if you can add one paragraph to introduce more about the related work. For example, introduce what other researchers did and what methods did they use in the previous studies, and conclude the advantages and disadvantages of their research.

7.     Figure 1: It would be better if you can add scale, compass, latitude, and longitude to this map.

8.     Figures 2-12: The font size is too small to be seen clearly.

9.     Tables 1-3: Reset the space between columns, especially make it wider for the column of NBS.

10.   Tables 1-4: What is the confidence interval of these results? Are all of them significant? Please add information of confidence interval (such as p-value) in the manuscript.

11.   Conclusion section: Please mention whether the correlation results are significant or not in the manuscript.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Main comments and suggestions

Abstract - needs improvement.  Abbreviations that have not been explained should not be used in abstracts. Why is moon illumination sometimes capitalized and sometimes lowercase? Abstract should be able to: describe the paper;  state the problem or the key issue; carry the reader through the research methodology, what it has found, and what conclusion have been reached from these findings.

Introduction - please save references to the bibliography in accordance with the requirements of the journal. Extensive portions of text in this chapter are not referenced - see- lines 54-63 and 65-71. In my opinion, this chapter should be more extensive and show what is the state of knowledge in the scientific problem under consideration, and the novelty of the proposed research should be emphasized.

M&M chapter

- names of measuring instruments should be given with the name of the model and manufacturer as well as accuracy and measuring range

- change to lower case when mentioning - lines 92-98. The units should be corrected here - km/h, hPa.

Subchapter 2.1. – please specify the exact number of measurement points; in what months the measurements were made; describe the location of the measuring instruments, i.e. at what height above ground level and how many points there were in a given locality; the characteristics of the city of Badajoz (number of inhabitants, which outdoor lighting they use) are not given. Also, information about the phase of the Moon during the measurements was not provided. The issue of sky cloudiness, which the authors did not take into account, is important in the assessment.

The authors did not specify what were (if any) the assumed conditions that allowed the start of the measurements. The text shows that no boundary conditions were adopted, therefore the obtained results are difficult to compare and, in my opinion, do not allow for a full analysis of NBS depending on weather conditions.

Combine the Results and Discussion chapters. Why do the authors provide only NSB data in the Results chapter? The results of meteorological measurements should also be placed here.

Line - 174 - 175 – there is no information about this from Fig. 2-12. Figures show only NBS changes but no reference to hours.

 

Line 184 - 188 - this information is redundant.

Line 189 - 201 - the text should be moved to the M&M section.

Please,  clarified what are A, B and C zones in the city of Badajoz.

Tables 1 to 3 - title; why is the word font capitalized?

Authors should use Moon and not moon in the text.

The discussion of the results should be developed and deepened with the results of other authors' works.

Conclusions - need to be changed. They must be short and related to the results obtained. The authors do not specify who may use their results and for what purpose.

References – should be formatted according to MDPI Sustainability journal requirements.

Minor editing of English language required -  correct naming and title of the Tables.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript has been improved compared with the first version, and the comments are responded suitably. I suggest accepting the current manuscript.

Reviewer 3 Report

I accept changes made by the authors to improve quality of their paper.