Spatial-Temporal Change of Actual Evapotranspiration and the Causes Based on the Advection–Aridity Model in the Weihe River Basin, China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Presented paper is original, with appropriate methods and original well presented results. Conclusions are correct and supported by the results. I have some minor clarified questions/remarks:
- What kind of kriging interpolation has been used ? May be some 2-3 sentences related to GIS analysis could be added into methods.
2.Since the line 300 you use the "sensitivity coefficient", please define it in methods
Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
The paper presents a spatio-temporal analysis of actual evapotranspiration (ETA), estimated using the AA model, for the Weihe River Basin, China. I have four main observations from my reading:
- The writing needs substantial improvements. There are uncountable grammatical and spelling errors in the manuscript, making it difficult to understand the technical issues. In terms of writing, the current version is not up to the standard that is necessary for a publication.
- AA model was used to estimate ETA – where ETA is a function of different meteorological variables. However, the same meteorological variable set was used to calculate their contribution to Eta. This is kind of counterintuitive given that the associated drivers already biased the estimated ETA. Further, there is no clear description of the different constants (such as the slope of the saturation VP curve, psychrometric constant) used to estimate ETA. Overall, the methodology is somehow not clear enough.
- How did the author estimate total runoff depth when the calculated water balance in Eq. 7? Where did they get the depth? Did you divide the outlet streamflow by the basin area to get watershed runoff? What about GW seepage? This is a pretty gross approximation.
- I understand there is a lot of approximation made in the method, which is reasonable given the problem's complexity. But those need to be adequately discussed. Although there are a lot of results, the discussion is minimal. Is there any study that used your approach to estimate ETA? And then how in the literature estimated ETA compares to the observed ETA? Why is ETA high in the eastern and southern parts and low in the westward and central areas? Are these homogenous surfaces, which is one of the main assumptions of Bouchet's hypothesis? What about the uncertainly of the estimated ETA? Given the complex methodology involved, it is essential to report and discuss the associated uncertainties. How the study contributes to the study basin's water management (not some generic lines – needs specific writeup)? Do we know the land use zonation of the study basin? How land use contributes to the estimations?
Specific Comments/Grammar/Spelling
Line 16: weather station
Line 18-20: Writing needs revision for better readability.
Line 20: An increasing trend was detected
Line 20-22: Writing needs work.
Line 28: Maybe better to add a sentence to summarize how this study contributes to the current knowledge, particularly for the Weihe River basin?
Line 31: (Overall comment on introduction) In the abstract, it has been indicated that the Weihe River basin has a particular significance related to the Eta. However, this was not brought adequately to attention in the introduction.
Line 34: Ecosystem
Line 38-40: Not grammatically correct
Line 68: dominant factor
Line 70: mainly factors?
Line 75: in situ
Line 87: What is CR?
Line 113: basin area?
Line 127-130: Needs revision
Line 139: Table 2
Table 1: What is station area – please clarify.
Line 156: Where Eq. 2 is referred to in the main text?
Line 158: Psychrometric
Line 190: Detect
Line 220: It is crucial to provide a statistical summary of the meteorological and hydrological data used for fitting and training.
Line 224: Where are those sub-areas in the location map? Authors need to indicate those and the river names in the map? This is the first time, all of a sudden, these sub-areas are introduced.
Line 229: What is Luohe? Also, the range of alpha Indicates there is not much variability among the sub-areas? The water balance in Table 2 is also similar? Then what is the rationale to split the basin?
Line 230: By writing 10%, do the authors indicate the relative error. This is kind of counterintuitive given that they used a minimum error method to fit the curve by varying alpha.
Line 230, 231, 233: I am not sure about the meaning of ‘control’ used here.
Line: 239: When we write annual average, there is no point of writing mm/a.
Line 240-242: How the seasonal values are calculated with the units of mm/a?
Line 239: What is whith? Also, insignificance because of low R2? Or is there a P-value?
Line 278: What is MK? Authors need to define that MK refers to the Mann Kendall test when it was first mentioned.
Line 488: Landscape
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
The subject addressed in this article is very suitable for publishing in Water. The text is however unfortunately very poorly written, has a weak structure and fails to appropriately present the intensions, methods and results. This makes the evaluation extremely difficult. This piece is not acceptable in the present form. I encourage the authors to completely rewrite the manuscript.
Author Response
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Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Thank you for your revised version. All my recommendations/suggestions were accepted. I recommend this article at the present version.
Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
Line 18: Please be specific about number of years instead of for many years. Also correct the corresponding statement in the result section.
Abstract: Does not read good after revision. Line 28-29 is out of place and suddenly appeared at the end with no context. There is lack of flow of thoughts here. Why suddenly the AA appears at the end?
Line 65: Among - not between.
Line 66-68: The writeup is very confusing – for example to be the dominant factor decreasing evapotranspiration – what does it mean? Can you cite more recent papers instead of a 1995 paper for USA?
Line 98: You mentioned previously that the method is used in some region. Now it is being claimed that the AA method is widely used – this is an inconsistency.
Line 102-103: Please add reference to support the statement.
Line 208-209: When you have more than two factors, then it should be among not between.
Line 210-211: Please rewrite.
Figure 4 and 7: I guess GIS is used for interpolation. What interpolation method is used and why? If you use other techniques, then whether we have different conclusions?
Figure 6: Sensitivity.
Line 518-519: I previously requested to add a summary statistic (Mean+SD. Min, Max) table for the data described in Line 134-136. I think it would have been better if the authors could add a table. Also it could be better to add NMIC website link as a reference.
Please write how you calculate the runoff depth?
Figure 1: I previously commented on that – please include sub basin area boundary in Figure 1. For example, from the figure, the readers then can know the contributing boundary of the Wei River, Beiluo River,, and Jing River sub-basins.
Table 1: Should be Capital letter – Catchment. Also. Which station belongs to which sub-basin?
Figure 2 and 3 Captions appear together.
Figure 4: Please indicate the sub-basin boundary in the map? What happens when you interpolate for each sub-basin separately? Also, I previously commented on the units issue – but unfortunately it is not properly revised. How come you have mm/yr units for seasonal averages?
Figure 5: Please see the above comment for Figure 4. Further, the map lacks consistency regarding map area.
Figure 7: Maybe I missed it – which sub-plot for which sensitivity coefficient?
Table 5: Is this spatiotemporal average? Then please mention it in the caption.
Table 6: Ea or ea? Please maintain consistency.
Line 403: What is mm.a-2?
Line 483: Please also indicate the correlation value.
Figure 8: What is the units of precipitation? Also, there is no point to show values after two decimals.
Line 529: Should be Conclusions
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
Dear authors, thank you very much for your efforts. You have improved the manuscript very much. Please address the comments that you find in the pdf file.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
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Round 3
Reviewer 2 Report
Line 53: what is a-10?
Line 98: Easiest is a strong statement – better to write relatively easier
Table 1: Not revised correctly. Which station belongs to what subbasin? Please add a column to include that .
Table 3: Very poorly prepared. What are those in row 1 for 1970-1979 for example? Are those means for the 1970-1979 time-period? You need to mention that in the Table? Why flow units is in volume? Should not it be volume/time? What is SD – need to write standard deviation.
Line 199-205: Where is the reference you mentioned in the revision note?
Figure 4: Please include units in the figure caption.
Figure 5: Very disappointing revision – I requested to make the Y-axis sensitivity to Sensitivity – not in the caption.
Line 645: Why capital letter?
Line 502-504: Why difficult? Please add a sentence to describe why it is difficult to estimate the anthropogenic impact? Further, what do you mean by human activities?
Author Response
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