Impacts of Climate Variability and Drought on Surface Water Resources in Sub-Saharan Africa Using Remote Sensing: A Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you very much for the opportunity to read this manuscript.
This is an interesting manuscript however need to re-write and re-structure the content.

Title: what kind of drought do authors want to talk about

Abstract: it is too general. The abstract didn’t explain the content of the research. Moreover, the authors have to emphasize their findings.

The author cited a lot of references as written in the references, however, the introduction lacked references for example lines 47, 51, 52. I believed these are not finding from this research.

Line 54-55: it seems the aim of the research but I couldn’t find it on the paper
Line 63: this part only talked about the importance but less talk about the impact
Line 71-75: give an example of the impact of monitoring climate and drought in some aspect, not only impact to agriculture, since this paper doesn’t focus on only agriculture.
Line 79 this line is confusing, do authors want to talk about management too? But there is no chapter talk about management in this paper.
Table 1, 7.1, 7.2, need to rewrite, make it simple, easy to read, and rich information. This information is useless in this format. Please make numbering in order, I couldn’t find table 2-6.
Line 224, 376, 450 authors have to write the finding and discuss their finding. It is difficult to follow what the authors want to write.

 

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting paper titled: "Remote sensing impacts of climate variability and drought on surface water resources in sub-Saharan Africa: A review". The paper is very in teresting and it is well constructed. The paper provides all the information needed to undertand the objectives and conclusions. In opinion of this reviewer, the paper can be accepted as it is. 

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

The paper respects the objective that a review of all the existing articles on the subject. The review is very detailed, exaustive and take into considerations all the aspects considering also the description of all kind of droughts, satellite and indices that could be used to monitor the phenomenon. May be is even too much detailed arriving at describing every aspect of the theme drought and climate variability, can almost be a manual. I do not think there are any particular comments to make except perhaps a greater organization of the various items taken into account.

Author Response

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Reviewer 4 Report

General comments:

 

Title: “Remote sensing impacts….” or “Remote sensing the impacts….”?

 

This is a review paper which provides,

- Overview of the progress of using remote sensing for monitoring climate variability and droughts impacts on surface water resources in sub-Saharan Africa

- Summarizes knowledge gaps/challenges for future studies

 

In general, this article summarizes a great deal of information. However, I was surprised to see how little information is included in precipitation observations (Surface water observations seem to be the primary focus). The "future challenges" part is only one paragraph. I was expecting to see more, especially because of the way how authors emphasize this part in the abstract - "Most importantly, this paper

highlights key scientific research strides and knowledge gaps for further investigations".

 

Line-by-line comments:

 

54: “prevent”? Isn’t “mitigate” would be more suitable?

57: “Literature demonstrates that surface water bodies are vulnerable to climate change (Huang, et al.,

2018)” → Previous studies such as Huang et. al. (2016) demonstrate that … (Aren’t there more studies than one?)

117: “However, remote sensing applications have not diversified, suggesting that its applicability has not been tested or fully exploited for monitoring purposes”. This is a plausible scenario. But it is not clear how did you conclude that using the data in Figure 1. Can you elaborate?

205: How the risk factor of figure 2 is calculated? I think it is crucial information that should be included in this paper. Moreover, it would be nice to have more description of the figure in the figure caption itself.

214: Table 1 would be a very useful summary. Can’t you highlight the years of top-five most severe droughts in the second column?

224: Section 5 discusses predominantly surface water observations. I don’t see any discussion on the precipitation measurements. Isn’t precipitation measurements used as a proxy to monitor droughts?

270: It makes sense that the coarse resolution MODIS observations can not see smaller water surfaces. It would be interesting/useful to know what is the smallest size that MODIS can get useful information and how many such water surfaces exist in the African region.

376: The abstract emphasizes the intention of reviewing the available remote sensing tools. Why not include a table here summarizing the products that you have reviewed? (You have a nice table about the indices)

612: This is the first time you mentioned AIRS??

 

Figures:

 

Figure02: It would be nice to have more description in the figure caption. Especially about the colors.

 

 

Author Response

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