Forecasting Sunflower Grain Yield by Assimilating Leaf Area Index into a Crop Model
, Luc Champolivier 2, Jean-François Dejoux 3, Ahmad Al Bitar 3, Pierre Casadebaig 4 and Philippe Debaeke 4Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
……........: Replace the ‘author’ with ‘researcher’ and do it throughout the manuscript.
Lines 42-43: you should write the following abbreviations (DSSAT, CERES, LNAS, SAFY, STICS, SUCROS, SWAP and WOFOST) in full names
Line 60: In this paper, we developed a data assimilation system for…………………….., you should write ‘in this study’ instead of ‘in this paper’, I suggest
Line 60: you should be consistence either write SUNFLO or sunflower and do it throughout the manuscript
I would really appreciate if you could avoid to use the “we” or “us”, instead of them you can refer to your study or research
Line 487: Abbreviations; all the Abbreviations should be inserted in the manuscript rather than stand alone. I would advise you to have a look at the article to write the full names of the abbreviations and then you can include their abbreviation throughout the manuscript. Overall, this article was written well and it needs to address the minor comments and then considered for publication.
Many thanks
Dr. Galal Omer
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The MS titles "Assimilating Leaf Area Index in a sunflower crop model under uncertainty on soil properties" developed a data assimilation system for the SUNFLO to optimize soil and state variables. The results presented in the study support the hypothesis that timely assimilation of remotely sensed state variables will improve the model performance compared to open-loop model simulation. It is a valuable research. Comments are as follows:
1、L73-74. Section 3.2.1. “we analysed the impact of weather series used to extrapolate simulations from the day of forecast to the harvesting day”. I can’t easily understand the relationship between this part of the research and the article title.
2、Whether the goal of the article should be to improve yield evaluation. Reducing the uncertainty of soil parameters and smoothing LAI through remote sensing assimilation is only a realization method. It is recommended to modify the title of the article to be consistent with the specific content.
3、The author uses 5 satellite remote sensing data sources, how to consider the coordinate offset between different sensors, or how to consider each sensor can accurately extract the research area, please add these explanations in the paper.
4、It is not easy to display the percentage error by using only RMSE. Can RMSE% be used?
5、L44-L53. It is recommended to give three common algorithms for assimilation methods (Forcing, calibration and updating), so that the reader can clearly understand the existing assimilation algorithms.
6、L113, Check this sentence “Landsat-8 provides VNIR images at 30 m spatial resolution and 12 days revisit”. 12 days revisit ? Not 16?
7、 Figure 8, In table 4, the author shows the LAI assimilation results of different methods, and it is recommended that Figure 8 also show the yield evaluation results of the corresponding methods.
8、L351. Check R2, 2 move up.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
The paper contributes to Remote Sensing journal. However is good idea to add some comments that I alreday added to the article body.
In the manuscirpt body, please write Landsat-8 instead of LandSat-8
In Figure 2 (a) in the Y axis write Landsat-8 instead of LandSat-8.
Generally, numbers from 1 to 10 in the manuscript body are writing with letter (e.g. three, five, seven).
In Figure 8 add "The black solid line represents 1:1 line".
In the discussion section please compare your finding with other agronomic models, add more discussion.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
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