Evolution over Time of Urban Thermal Conditions of a City Immersed in a Basin Geography and Mitigation
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Summary
Understanding how urban thermal dynamics evolve is important for sustainable development under climate change. Here, Pacheco et al., analyzed how urban meteorological conditions (temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed) changed over time along with air pollutants (PM2.5, PM10, and CO) using entropy-based method. Before I recommend this work for publications, substantial revisions are needed especially about methods, interpretation of results, and discussions. I list the following specific comments to further improve the manuscript.
Specific comments
1) Line 10: “each period is 3.25 years” to “each period has 3.25 years”
2) Line 49-51: “The main cause is …. Rivers or lakes”. Not exactly correct and also citations are needed. The main reason is due to the land surface energy flux partitioning and impervious surface can hardly get latent-heat induced cooling effects but more sensible heat induced increasing temperature. The following papers introduced more details of land-surface-energy flux partitioning and its impacts.
Mirzaei, P. A., & Haghighat, F. (2010). Approaches to study urban heat island–abilities and limitations. Building and environment, 45(10), 2192-2201.
Yuan, K., Zhu, Q., Riley, W. J., Li, F., & Wu, H. (2022). Understanding and reducing the uncertainties of land surface energy flux partitioning within CMIP6 land models. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 319, 108920.
Yuan, K., Zhu, Q., Zheng, S., Zhao, L., Chen, M., Riley, W. J., ... & Chen, L. (2021). Deforestation reshapes land-surface energy-flux partitioning. Environmental Research Letters, 16(2), 024014.
3) Line 73: “Kolmogorov entropy” first mentioned but without any introduction before. I would briefly introduce what’s “Kolmogorov entropy”, and its advantages by first, and then describe what we did. Otherwise, readers may have no idea about what you are trying to do after reading the introduction
4) Line 79, what’s “metric entropy” and what’s its difference with “Kolmogorov entropy”? Also what’s its relationship with Shannon entropy? please introduce it by first. Such item was first mentioned but without any introduction.
5) Eq. 1, does Sk represent the “Kolmogorov entropy”? please clarify it.
6) Eq. 1,what do “P0…n”, “n”, and “τ” represent? please clarify it.
7) Eq.2, what do “Inew”, “Iold”, and “i0(t)” represent? Also what does a larger loss of information mean? please clarify it.
8) Line 158, move “Ck” to the method section (section 2), and introduce its calculation, and clarify what does this value mean. What does Sk,MV, SK,P and i represent? Introduce it in the method section
9) We cannot just put the results there without any interpretation. Section 3, for each of the graph, add an additional short paragraph to interpretate the results. What did these kinds of number mean? Use plain language that everyone can understand. Actually, I have a lot of knowledge and works on entropy, and land-atmosphere processes, but I can hardly understand those numbers. I think most readers cannot neither.
10) Line 172: “2010.2013” to “2010 to 2013”
11) Section 4: Discussions. This study mainly analyzed three air pollutes and three meteorological variables. Please briefly discuss other pollutants or aerosols or greenhouse gas emissions could also affect urban thermal dynamics
12) Abstract: please use plain language to describe and interpretate the findings. The current version of abstract is almost not understandable
Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
This paper investigated the evolution of an urban thermal environment by adopting metric entropy. This method is interesting, and the following comments should be carefully identified:
1. the structure of this study should be improved as it is now like a technical report.
2. for introduction part, more information and relevant studies about metric entropy should be given.
3. for the flowchart, the description should be rich.
4. for the figures, the titles and labels seem lost.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
The article is not ready for publication since it lacks a consistent structure in displaying the methods used.
Kolmogorov entropy can be used to analyze air pollution and meteorological time series, but it may not be the most suitable measure for this purpose since entropy can be influenced by the level of noise in the data, and the complexity of the underlying dynamics. An overview of the other possible methods to archive the aim should be discussed.
A related work section is missing, the authors should gather their citations in it and reflect how these other research relates to their own work.
The authors refer to the ”Heat islands” phenomenon while in literature it is known as the urban heat island effect, please consider rephrasing to match the common definitions in literature also citations referring to urban heat need more details as for the ones in line 54.
The equations need better formatting, an explanation of the process in text format needs to be provided, referring only to the figure is not sufficient; section 1.2.1 cannot contain only a figure and almost not text.
The authors need to describe the method used in much more details and they need to justify why it has been chosen, integrating with explanation on how the results are confuting the conclusion.
The authors state that through the tables and figures provided their findings can be seen, but this is not the case since the figures are difficult to interpret and need to be remade with today’s standards and there are too many tables. Some of the tables should be translated in to graphs. The tables could then be moved to an appendix with better formatting to ease the reading. Also, all findings need to be described and discussed in the text with references to the figures/tables.
Author Response
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Reviewer 4 Report
The authors present Evolution over time of urban thermal conditions of a city im-mersed in a basin geography and mitigation. The study is interesting. In general, the main conclusions presented in the paper are supported by the figures and supporting text. However, to meet the journal quality standards, the following comments need to be addressed.
• Abstract: Should be improved and extended. The authors talk lot about the problem formulation, but novelty of the proposed model is missing. Also provided the general applicability of their model. Please be specific what are the main quantitative results to attract general audiences.
• The introduction can be improved. The authors should focus on extending the novelty of the current study. Emphasize should be given in improvement of the model (in quantitative sense) compared to existing state-of-the art models.
• More details about network architecture and complexity of the model should be provided.
• what about comparison of the result with current state-of-the art models? Did authors perform ablation study to compare with different models?
• What are the baseline models and benchmark results? The authors may compared the result with existing models evaluated with datasets
• Conclusion parts needs to be strengthened.
• Please provide a fair weakness and limitation of the model, and how it can be improved.
• Typographical errors: There are several minor grammatical errors and incorrect sentence structures. Please run this through a spell checker.
Author Response
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Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors generally addressed my concerns. Thanks
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Reviewer 2 Report
None
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Reviewer 3 Report
The authors have addressed my comments. However the work presented in this article is too close in the scope and methodology to this already published article https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/14/2/357 reference [41].
The authors should better refer to their previous work stating how the current work methodology differ from previous work, what is its novelty and how it improve or complement the previous work.
At line 13 the authors state "providing 3,074,004 data", it should be "data records".
At line 210 the authors state "over 5000 data" , it should be "data points", same for line 226.
Figure 8 should have a better description.
Author Response
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