Comparison of Soil Water Content from SCATSAR-SWI and Cosmic Ray Neutron Sensing at Four Agricultural Sites in Northern Italy: Insights from Spatial Variability and Representativeness

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Comment:
- Line 168: Unfortunately, the provided link is not working. Can you please refer readers to the device's manual instead?

- The authors mentioned, "The average value for each date and site was calculated to represent the daily average." Why was the daily average used rather than the time of Sentinel-1 or ASCAT overpass?

- Section 2.3: The authors should provide a more detailed description of the product resolution and general information about the retrieval process. At the very least, the spatial and temporal resolution should be clearly indicated.

- Line 213: I would suggest using "weather and climate conditions" instead of "atmospheric conditions."

- Lines 225-232: Sentinel-2 provides a high spatial resolution of 10-30 m. Readers would be interested to know whether this data was aggregated to the 1 km level of the study site or if high-resolution NDVI was used. Those details should be mentioned in methods/data section.

- In the subsection under Section 3.2, I would recommend a more precise title, such as "SM Variability as a Function of Vegetation or Soil."

- Figure 2: Can you please explain the missing data at the Ceregnano site?

- Could you comment on the preprocessing of the in-situ measurements? Do the sites experience freeze-thaw cycles that would require removing part of the data?

- The discussion section lacks an in-depth investigation of the obtained results. The authors should explore the sources of uncertainty that may arise due to the fusion of passive and active remote sensing data.

- The influence of active and passive retrievals on SWC depth estimation should be discussed.

- The remote sensing component in the discussion section requires further elaboration.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Moderate editing of English language required.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors Overall, I think this manuscript is well-designed with methods description and results analysis. As such, I am recommending it for publication.

 

  

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This study compares the differences between SCATSAR - SWI and CRNS in estimating SWC at four agricultural sites in Northern Italy and explores the factors associated with spatial variability and representativeness, including vegetation, soil and irrigation management. The following aspects could be further studied and explored:

1.The manuscript compares the SCATSAR-SWI product, which has a spatial resolution of 1 km, with the SWC estimated by CRNS. However, the SWC estimated by CRNS is at the intra-field scale, has the issue of spatial resolution unification been considered before comparing? And what kind of processing methods can be adopted to make the SCATSAR-SWI products comparable with the SWC estimated by CRNS?

2. It seems that there is no validation of the SWC estimated by CRNS in the manuscript. If there is any validation of the results, please write down the details of the location of the validation in the reply letter; if there is a lack of validation, it is suggested to add the text of the validation-related elaboration.

3. The methods used in the manuscript to compare and analyze the results of SCATSAR - SWI products and CRNS estimation of SWC, as well as to analyze the correlation between vegetation, soil texture, SOC, irrigation information and soil water content, etc. are relatively traditional, and do not highlight the highlights, and the innovations need to be further condensed.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

As for the questions raised, revisions have been made in the revised manuscript to meet the requirements. Accept in present form