Glacial Lake Changes and Identification of Potentially Dangerous Glacial Lakes in the Yi’ong Zangbo River Basin
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The impact of global climate change has dramatically exacerbated water-related natural disasters like glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) over the world. Such hazards have brought about enormous economic damages over the world. Therefore, it is necessary to identify glacial lakes that are dangerous or have the potential to flood. This manuscript has introduced some essential information for the glacial lakes and methods to identify dangerous glacial lakes in the Yi’ong Zangbo River Basin. And, also, the authors made some research efforts on the changes in glacial lakes and considered its relation with climate and glacier changes. It is helpful for readers to know more about this kind of study in the research area. However, in the research paper lakes some information about image sources and dates and should be clarified for defining the glacial lakes type. Also, needs to provide more evidence and references in the discussion part.
Some major points are as follows:
(1) In the Methods, it lacks the details of image information. Please provide image date and image resolutions of the “Map World images, Google Earth scenes, Advanced Space borne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) digital elevation model (DEM), the first and second Chinese Glacier Inventories.”
(2) I think the authors should have more details to descript how they got the areas of the lakes besides the introduction of the utilization of images. Actually, Landsat OLI can identify lakes in small sizes where it has 0,001km2 area. The author also should consider small lakes in size of 0,001-0,007km2.
(3) The most important issue is “all lakes were preliminarily classified into glacial lakes (GLs) and non-glacial lakes (NGLs) based on whether there had glacier melt water supply”. Here is not clear. Have you extracted the glacial lakes and non-glacial lakes within the glacier-morainic complex? Or non-glacial lakes were extracted outside of the glacier-morainic complex? If you extracted both lakes within glacier-moraine, you shouldn't call as a "non-glacial lake". They are also glacial lakes. Because they are located in the glacier-morainic complex.
(4) Current paper mentioned 3 types of lakes: (1) glacial erosion lakes (GELs), (2) moraine-dammed lakes and (3) supraglacial lakes (SGLs). I can't see the differences between 1st and 2nd types. Principally, their geomorphology is the same.
(5) There’s some figures which I could not understand and order of figures should follow by alphabets. I confused with the order of Figures. Please change (replace) the order of Figures like Figure 3a should stay with Figure 2a. Figure 2b should move to Figure 3b. Also, the authors stated in Figure 2b “in the other size classes, the number of glacial lakes were basically unchanged”. Actually, I see other lakes also changing by area size class from Fig.2b. Not only lakes in 0,1 area classes.
(6) In the discussion, I don't see the meaning of dividing into two paragraphs as 4.1 and 4.2. Because you mentioned the same meaning in the first and second paragraphs. It is better to connect these two and make one paragraph. So, it would clearly follow the meaning of the current paragraph, like the first you discuss how glacial lakes changing and in the second their relations with climate and glacier change. Also, please provide references. The glacier dynamics should be illustrated in the figure.
(7) References: Please be sure that all the references cited in the manuscript are also included in the reference list and vice versa with matching spellings and dates.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
First of all, we want to thank you for your constructive comments on our manuscript, which give a great help to improve our paper. Our manuscript does have many shortcomings, for example, some details about data source and figures. We have modified the article based on your comments. For some places that you feel unclear but we think are reasonable, we have explained in detail and hope to help you understand it. The specific modification are in my reply. Thank you again. Best wishes for you.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
In this work Hongyu et al. present their glacial lake inventory for the southeastern Tibetan Plateau.
Minor comments:
In the data section a series of remote sensing, topographic, etc. are mentioned. However, it is not well explained in the document how the data is used. Which images are used?
Quality control is "guaranteed", how?
You mentioned that determining the glacial lake type is difficult so you have to use high res imagery...but did not mention how you did that.
Section 3.2 needs to be rewritten. It is very unorganized how they present the results. Using tables may help.
Section 4.1 summarizes the results but it does not really provide a meaningful discussion
Section 4.2 opens a new topic, which is climate change and tries to explain the formation of new glacier lakes and the disappearance of old ones. Since this is not part of this study it would be good if the authors could provide references to back up the glacier dynamics discussion.
On page 12 line 306, you mention that the method was used successfully in reference [23]. What do you mean by successfully? Did it actually "predict" real GLOFs and matched the results from that study? or was just it able to classified the lakes as you did here?
Major comments:
I understand and share that there is a great need for this new information. However, I am concern about the novelty of the paper. The glacier lake mapping is a straightforward process work and is heavily based on the reference [29] and [30] as well as previous inventories. However, this work does not move the methodologies since it fails to provide a quantitative or at least a more robust idea of "risk".
What are the criteria for using 4 groups in Table 2? This crucial because you use these values in equation 4 to determine P. P means potentiality, what is the scale reference? It is important to mention that is compared to the other glacier lakes study in this work.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
First of all, we want to thank you for your constructive comments on our manuscript, which give a great help to improve our paper. We have modified the article based on your comments. For some places that you feel unclear but we think are reasonable, we have explained in detail and hope to help you understand it. The specific modification are in my reply. Thank you again. Best wishes for you.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The quality of this work has changed significantly. The current paper considerably improvement compared to the previous one. It is noticeable the author tried to answer all the questions in which they were not clear. The author also complied with all the requirements.
However, there are still minor flaws in this article. Questions uploaded in the seminal paper.
It is recommended that the authors check carefully again.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you very much for your valuable comments on this article, and we have tried to modify it as much as possible. The question that appears most frequently in this paper is whether non-glacial lakes are included in our study. The fact is we only studied the changes and dangers of glacial lakes. Some figures have too small symbol, we have enlarged them. Thanks again for your significant comments on our manuscript. Best wishes for you.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
I think the paper has improved considerably from the first version. The authors have responded to my first revision and I have no further comments.
Author Response
Thank you very much for your comments on this article, which are very valuable to us. We have revised the article as much as possible according to your comments, including the introduction of the recent glacial lakes outburst disaster in the study area, the description of the area and area expansion of lakes with very high and high outburst potential, and the comparison of the results about glacier change and glacial lake change in the adjacent area. We made some improvements to the language of the article through a professional language modification service company, modified parts are marked with tracking mode. Thank you again, and appreciate your valuable comments on this paper. Best wishes for you.
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.
