Spatiotemporal Patterns of Multiscale Drought and Its Impact on Winter Wheat Yield over North China Plain

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

My comments are write in the anex file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Review of “Spatiotemporal patterns of multiscale drought and its impact on winter wheat yield over North China Plain”

Journal: AGRONOMY

Manuscript ID: agronomy-1718822

Authors: Jiujiang Wu , Gang Cheng , Nan Wang , Hongzheng Shen , Xiaoyi Ma^*

 

General Comments

The paper used Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index as drought index in combination with Standardized Yield Residual Series and the Vegetation Condition Index to evaluate the spatiotemporal characteristics of multiscale drought and its effect on winter wheat growth in the North China Plain. The manuscript is generally well written even though some sentences could be more elegantly presented. The research methodology employed is sound and the topic of manuscript is certainly a very interesting one from a scientific point of view. I recommend minor revisions.

Specific Comments

1. I suggest adding a methodological framework/flow chart in Materials and methods section so that readers could easily understand the methods adopted in this study.
2. Quality of figures is not good. Legends are too small and not readable (e.g. Figure 2, 6, and 7). Line graphs in Figure 2 and Figure 6 needs explanation what are they and what results are inferred from them.
3. (P1/LL39-43) “China is a large agricultural country ……………… sustainable development.” Need rephrasing, hard to understand what authors actually want to emphasize here.
4. (P1/L43) What are other two major crops in China?
5. (P1/L47) Delete “patterns”
6. (P3/L103) How the classification accuracy was assessed? Elaborate in the revised manuscript.
7. In section 2.2 Dataset, meteorological dataset used was from 2001 to 2015, while yield dataset used was from 2002 to 2015. What exact study period you used in this study. Moreover, it is recommended to use the most recent years data to check the current trend of drought and yield.
8. (P3/L118) Which remote sensing data authors used and for what purpose, need to elaborate.
9. (P3/L129) What authors want emphasize by saying “if one grid was not enough, the grid was calculated according to one grid”?
10. (P3/LL133-135) How SPEI is more realistic representation of actual drought as compare to SPI in the region? This is very strong statement without any proof in this research.
11. (P4/LL159-160) Not clear how trend yield was removed and detrended series of residual was used? Please elaborate and used of mathematical equation could be helpful.
12. (P5/L171) How different values of VCI indicates the growth during the growing season. During seedling the growth may be good but VCI may show small value and it may be wrongly interpreted as poor growth. Similarly, when plants are fully mature, VCI may show high values, but growth maybe not up to the mark. Don’t author thinks VCI value range may not indicate proper vegetation growth during the growing season?
13. (P6/L209) How this trend was estimated, please include in methodology section. Moreover, how wetter and dryer regions were defined based on SPEI, please elaborate.
14. There are some grammatical and typos errors which should be double-checked before final submission.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx