RiceSAP: An Efficient Satellite-Based AquaCrop Platform for Rice Crop Monitoring and Yield Prediction on a Farm- to Regional-Scale

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

Congratulations on your present document. My opinion is that it is ready for publications.

Best regards

Reviewer 2 Report

My remarks have been satisfactorily been taken into account.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript aims to introduce a rice smart agriculture platform (RiceSAP) that is developed based on AquaCrop model and satellite information. However, the manuscript at current state is more close to a technical report than a scientific paper. In general, it is not easy to follow the manuscript as its structure is not very clear, and some important things may be missing. The authors may need to rewrite their story.

• Details on field data collection are required. For instance, please detail the ways of collecting CC and crop yield.
• Section 2.2., the manuscript does not clearly show how to incorporate different satellite data with different temporal and spatial resolution into the AquaCrop model. Did they cover the same study region?
• Figure 2 and 3, please specific the test site;
• Figure 11, please detail how to get these two relationships.
• The authors may not need to take large space to introduce the RiceSAP.
• Many figures were present in the method section, while two figures and three tables about the results were shown in the result section.
• The discussion section is very weak. Please do not repeat directly the results that have been showed the result section.
• Conclusion section is missing.
• The manuscript in current state cannot prove that the RiceSAP is efficient for rice crop monitoring and yield prediction on both Farm and regional scale.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Although the topic in discussion is interesting and the document dense and detail, I find that from the reader's point of view, the methods section is extremely dense and detailed. There are parts of that should be removed or summarized. For example

• Section 2.3.1 - Input parameters is extremely dense and should be summarized.  Note that the first paragraph of this section occupies more than 1/2 of a page.
• Section 2.4 - Again it's too dense. Is it really necessary to display the application pages? For a reader, what is to gain from that? If a reader is interested in those details, just leave a link to a reference or webpage etc.
• Section 3.2 is a waste of manuscript space. The figure and table are not very informative, and the text does not provide any support.
• Where's the conclusion? Please add one.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper presents a local to regional rice monitoring system in Thailand based on the AquaCrop model driven by satellite data, used for rainfall, land surface temperature and canopy cover estimation. The overall paper is well written and an appropriate and convincing description of the whole system, the experimental setup, satellite date processing, together with the calibration procedures used is provided. I recommend the publication of the paper provided the following improvements are included:
- It is unclear how the 5-year average historical satellite-derived climate parameters have been generated and used as predicted weather data. Especially for rainfall, 5-year averages could even out rainfall temporal patterns and result in a non-realistic seasonal distributon of rains, and subsequently also in non-realistic crop simulations. More details could be given when introducing Alpha I, and discussed accordingly.
- In the description of the RiceSAP platform, the paper could be more specific about the operationality of the system: Is the system already implemented and operational, or only in a testing phase? Which area is covered (some districts, the whole country)? How many farmers have already used the system? These informations could then be used to strengthen the discussion part, on the applicability of the platform.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf