Anthropogenic and Climate-Driven Water Storage Variations on the Mongolian Plateau
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear All,
I have posted the comments on the attched file.
Best wishes
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear editor and reviewers:
Thank you very much for taking time to review our manuscript, your insightful and comprehensive comments have enabled us to significantly improve our work. Following the instructions, we uploaded the file of the revised manuscript. Accordingly, we have uploaded a copy of the revised manuscript with all the changes highlighted by red font.
Appended to this letter is our point-by-point response to the comments raised by the reviewers. The comments are reproduced in black text, and our responses are given directly afterward in blue text. We hope that the revised manuscript has addressed all the concerns from reviewers.
Sincerely,
All co-authors
The point-by-point response to the comments can be found in the attached word file.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Thank you for providing me an opportunity to review entitled manuscript "Anthropogenic and climate-driven water storage variations on the Mongolian Plateau'. Authors have evaluated the water storage loss/gain mainly effected by climate and anthropogenic impacts separately using suitable statistical analysis and remote sensing data. Overall manuscript provides interesting findings. However there are some major/minor issues that authors need to revise before publication of this paper in RS.
It is recommended that the author rewrite the Introduction, increase the citation of the literature, and extract questions and useful information from the literature. Through literature review, point out the shortcomings of existing research, thus leading to the article's environmental significance and purpose. In this section, the literature review needs to be more critical. The authors should detail the methodological novelties with the vast amount of existing literature in this area. Literatures about about anthropogenic and climate induced signals decomposition is relatively weak. Authors should expand literatures and provide justification why they selected ICA analysis. While some studies have using land surface modeling output. Example:
Joodaki, G., J. Wahr, and S. Swenson (2014), Estimating the human contribution to groundwater depletion in the Middle East, from GRACE data, land surface models, and well observations, Water Resour. Res., 50, 2679–2692, doi:10.1002/ 2013WR014633.
Why authors chosen 0.5 degree mascon product of GRACE. Recent release are also available at 0.25 degree. Justify selection of GRACE data. Also instead of using original GRACE data, it might be good idea to use some suitable spatial downscaling methods to improve the understanding to water storage trends loss/gain at local scale. These papers might be good to cite and discussed as foundation of future downscaling methods in discussion section : "Combining downscaled-GRACE data with SWAT to improve the estimation of groundwater storage and depletion variations in the Irrigated Indus Basin (IIB)" and "Constructing high-resolution groundwater drought at spatio-temporal scale using GRACE satellite data based on machine learning in the Indus Basin" and "Spatial downscaling of GRACE data based on XGBoost model for improved understanding of hydrological droughts in the Indus Basin Irrigation System (IBIS)"
All datasets have different resolutions. How did authors have handled it?
It's not clear how authors defined anthropogenic and climate signals in ICA framework. Please clarify. Also its seems authors have used Humphrey scheme for predicting climate induced trends of water storage changes. While the parameters calibration values and predicted outputs of this method is not adequately provided in the results section.
Figure 5 (a): Why WGHM trend is constant over time?
Minor editing of English language required
Author Response
Dear editor and reviewers:
Thank you very much for taking time to review our manuscript, your insightful and comprehensive comments have enabled us to significantly improve our work. Following the instructions, we uploaded the file of the revised manuscript. Accordingly, we have uploaded a copy of the revised manuscript with all the changes highlighted by red font.
Appended to this letter is our point-by-point response to the comments raised by the reviewers. The comments are reproduced in black text, and our responses are given directly afterward in blue text. We hope that the revised manuscript has addressed all the concerns from reviewers.
Sincerely,
All co-authors
The point-by-point response to the comments can be found in the attached word file.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear All,
The following reference is missing from the list and within the text. Please add it. It was suggested during the first review.
Othman, A.; Abdelrady, A.; Mohamed, A. Monitoring Mass Variations in Iraq Using Time-Variable Gravity Data. Remote Sens. 2022, 14, 3346. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14143346
Author Response
We added it, thanks!
