Backscattering Analysis Utilizing Relaxed Hierarchical Equivalent Source Algorithm (RHESA) for Scatterers in Vegetation Medium

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The abstract made me very interested as the study promises a new methodology which allows for the calculation of backscatter with less simplistic assumptions on the geometry of an object. On the very specifics of the equations I need to pass and ask more suitable reviewers to give their feedback. However, one comment is that most papers cited are authored/co-authored by Ewe. I wonder if there are not more authors specialised in this field and if there aren't more recent publications building on the cited work to give more context.

The relevance of the proposed study is given as improving the description of vegetation in radiative transfer modelling, I assume therefore applications such as biomass retrievals etc. The paper stays very theoretical though and there is also no ground truth data available or at least some experiments for the mentioned applications.

Most paragraphs are extremely brief and read like a technical report and again, the need a very specific kind of peer reviewer for intense scrutiny. However, if the paper aims at being a new theoretical foundation I have the impression that the discussions and examples are also too brief.

While the results of the new methodology are discussed it is unclear to me how it can be shown that it is improved. Backscatter coefficients are different to the analytical results shown but to my understanding these results are also based on 'generic' shapes and not the complex geometries the methodology is supposed to work with?

All in all, I believe this is a very interesting subject but the paper requires major work with some broader context and examples/discussions of results.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

Authors investigated to improve the backscattering cross section of cylinder and elliptic disk shaped scatterer. But my major concerns are that the topic of the manuscript could not be suitable for Remote Sensing journal, because the present manuscript is not highly related to remote sensing.

Furthermore, the results did not provide any evaluation of the proposed method, the information from all figures are confused. Considering the requirement of Remote Sensing and Technical Note, I can not recommend an acceptance.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

It will be exciting to see the application of the model based on actual data.

Author Response

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Reviewer 4 Report

This study by Syahali et al. proposed an update of the workflow in modelling the backscattering of layers of dense vegetation medium for microwave remote sensing. The update is focused on replacing the analytical method with the RHESA algorithm in volume scattering calculation, which is claimed to offered freedom to model any shape of scatterer. The authors reported good performance of the updated workflow and potential to be used in more complicated vegetation medium. 

 

Overall, I found this report to be interesting. The math and physics involved into the algorithm development are generally solid from a microwave RS perspective. Length-wise it suits the exception of a technical note. Some figures can be improved if needed (see my specific comments).  As such, I recommend this article to be accepted for publication after minor revision. 

 

Specific comments:

- texts labelling are not very clear on Fig. 2/3, can be improved for better readability;

- Discussion section can be improved with a better link to the real-world applications. 

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Thanks for accouting for all of my comments.