Assessing the Resilience of Agricultural Reservoirs in Ungauged Catchments under Climate Change Using a Ratio Correction Factors-Based Calibration and Run Theory

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a well-written paper with an interesting topic. It can be characterized as an integrated approach to develop the calibration method for optimizing the simulation of reservoirs in ungauged catchments, and to analyze the resilience of agricultural reservoir operations under climate change. The organization and length of the article are satisfactory with results clearly represented and adequate references. As it is within the scope of the Journal of Water, it is worthy of publication, however a minor improvement is needed. The comments can be summarized, as follows:

• In lines 48-49 i would rather to change once the word “accordingly”, because it is repeated.
• In lines 53- 57 there is a long sentence, which is not fully understood.
• In line 54 the right phrase is ‘’were evaluated’’ instead “was evaluated’’.
• It would be preferable in whole article the references in the text that have names such as in line 57 “Fallah-Mehdipour et al” have also the dates.
• In the introduction section the study area is not mentioned.
• It would be very interesting to add a map of study area in section 3.1, where is mentioned.
• In line 213, I would rather to change the phrase “Tank model”, because it is repeated many times.
• A consistency in Equations (3), (4) in lines 252-253 (format) should be kept.
• Figure 7 should have better analysis.
• The Conclusions section should provide some main conclusions from this study.

Author Response

Dear Editor and Reviewers

We appreciate the feedback and comments, which have contributed to an improved paper.

In revised manuscript, main revisions are as below,

• Re-constructing the Introduction to make clear the background, previous studies and aims of this study
• Adding the explanation of overall methodology with new Figure 1
• Adding the detailed explanation of climate change scenario in the section 2.4
• Revising the Conclusion to specify the main findings in this study

Once all of comments have been addressed, please see the point-by-point responses in the attachment.

We appreciate again your thoughtful comments, and look forward to hearing your reply.

Kind regards, on behalf of all co-authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for sharing this manuscript. Writing, structure and presentation of the content, detailed description of the methodology and outcomes are really well done. 

One of main question from this research is uncertainties of RCF application of the current climatic condition to the future GCM outputs. These coefficients being based on the observed values may over or under estimate in case of future climatic conditions. Seasonality of the precipitation patterns and irrigation requirements of the present climate applied in RCF function coefficients to the future climate. As you might be well aware, there are many researches on changes to rainfall patterns, seasonality and intensity of the rainfall in future GCM projections and this might affect reservoir operation patterns in future. If authors find a way to connect RCF calibration to the monthly rainfall amount, this question would be less pronounced.

Another point to address. Although method of using reservoir water level to assess model performance is well applied in present, it leaves a question if just calibration would be enough, and no validation of the proposed RCF coefficients is needed. I would hope author apply RCF coefficient to validate them first before climate change analysis, so it will be possible to see how model performs on limited observations.

Please provide description of GCM data that was used and why this particular ensemble was selected. Although bias correction was applied for the GCM, it doesn’t address uncertainties of the GCM and this ensemble member variations.

 

Short comments on the content.

Please, describe variables in turn as they appear in text. Example (lines 278-280) OPWD − PWD. OPWD should be first, this is true to the most of formula variables description in manuscript.

262. Suggest to use OPWD instead of OPD, as it is used further in the text
263. OWPD - mistype
264. Shouldn't this be Finflow?
265. Shouldn't this be Foutflow?

 

Figures 6 and 7, are difficult for interpretation. Please, include dam threshold value and max reservoir value to the graphs, for easier understanding.

Author Response

Dear Editor and Reviewers

We appreciate the feedback and comments, which have contributed to an improved paper.

In revised manuscript, main revisions are as below,

• Re-constructing the Introduction to make clear the background, previous studies and aims of this study
• Adding the explanation of overall methodology with new Figure 1
• Adding the detailed explanation of climate change scenario in the section 2.4
• Revising the Conclusion to specify the main findings in this study

Once all of comments have been addressed, please see the point-by-point responses in the attachment.

We appreciate again your thoughtful comments, and look forward to hearing your reply.

Kind regards, on behalf of all co-authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

I have roughly examined this manuscript. A large number of work has been conducted in this version. However, the overall structure of the paper seems a bit of confused. Therefore, I encourage the authors to rewrite it with a well-organized structure and a clearly presented novelty. At this stage, I do not recommend it to this journal for publication.

1. The introduction section should be re-organized. This context must focus on the presented aims (the last paragraph). Why the line 74-88 is placed here?
2. In the section 2: Please present one general description about your analysis framework. We cannot understand the purpose of the available dataset.
3. Most contexts in the section 3.1 could be removed to section 2. They are related to the study region rather the results analysis.
4. The author should separate the section into two sub-parts. In this version, we scarcely see the discussion context.
5. Please rewrite the conclusion section. Focus on the findings from your study rather than repeat the introduction section.

Author Response

Dear Editor and Reviewers

We appreciate the feedback and comments, which have contributed to an improved paper.

In revised manuscript, main revisions are as below,

• Re-constructing the Introduction to make clear the background, previous studies and aims of this study
• Adding the explanation of overall methodology with new Figure 1
• Adding the detailed explanation of climate change scenario in the section 2.4
• Revising the Conclusion to specify the main findings in this study

Once all of comments have been addressed, please see the point-by-point responses in the attachment.

We appreciate again your thoughtful comments, and look forward to hearing your reply.

Kind regards, on behalf of all co-authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Congratulation to the authors for improving manuscript. Although, I believe some figures may have been improved for easier readability, scope and amount of work for this manuscript qualifies for the publication in the journal.

 

1290 - mistype of the reservoir name Sumchun in the figure