Integrated and Individual Impacts of Land Use Land Cover and Climate Changes on Hydrological Flows over Birr River Watershed, Abbay Basin, Ethiopia
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This paper is well-presented and it also reads well. The research method is also clearly stated and the results make sense to me. There are some minor issues listed as follows for the authors to consider and address them.
(1) Line 63, “Because of its abandoned economic and social importance, several kinds…..” is the abandoned a typo? I have difficulty understanding this sentence.
(2) There are several times the authors use “Individual climate change…”, would you consider using “climate change effect alone…..” in this case?
(3) Line 491 “In the Birr River watershed, The cumulative effect of both climate and LULC change on hydrological flow is more sensitive.” Please consider rephrasing the sentence, to me an effect can’t be sensitive.
(4) Also, table 8 Should not be part of the discussion section. I would move it to somewhere in section 2 and refer to it when needed. It is part of the background information.
(5) I don’t think the land data and climate data align well when doing scenario analysis (Table 2). There is no need to change here, it is just my personal opinion.
(6) Strongly encourage the authors to give this manuscript serious proofreading. Maybe that is all needed to make this manuscript qualified for publication.
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 1 Comments
Authors’ response to reviewers’ comments entitled Combined and Separate Effects of Land Use/Land Cover and Climate Changes on Hydrological Flows over Birr River Watershed, Abbay Basin, Ethiopia
Manuscript ID: water-2057470
Thank you very much for your insightful and helpful comments on this manuscript. I appreciate your clearly stated and well-defined remarks in the manuscript. We have addressed all of your comments below.
Point 1: Line 63, “Because of its abandoned economic and social importance, several kinds…..” is the abandoned a typo? I have difficulty understanding this sentence.
Response 1: thank you very much for your insightful comment. I just corrected it like this, Many types of research have been conducted to investigate the effect of climate and LULC change on hydrological flows using a hydrological model due to the enormous economic and social importance of these climate and LULC changes
Point 2: There are several times the authors use “Individual climate change…”, would you consider using “climate change effect alone…..” in this case?
Response 2: thank you for your best question. The answer is “Yes”. The main focus of the paper is to investigate the individual and integrated effects of climate and LULC change on hydrology. See section 3.2.2 for individual effects of climate change on hydrological flows
Point 3: Line 491 “In the Birr River watershed, The cumulative effect of both climate and LULC change on hydrological flow is more sensitive.” Please consider rephrasing the sentence, to me an effect can’t be sensitive.
Response 3: Thank you very much for your suggestion. I have corrected like this, In the Birr River watershed, The cumulative effect of climate and LULC change on hydrological flow is greater than the individual effect of climate and LULC change
Point 4: Also, table 8 Should not be part of the discussion section. I would move it to somewhere in section 2 and refer to it when needed. It is part of the background information.
Response 4: Thank you very much for your suggestion. Based on your suggestion I have corrected and moved the table to section 2.
Point 5: I don’t think the land data and climate data align well when doing scenario analysis (Table 2). There is no need to change here, it is just my personal opinion.
Response 5: Thank you very much for your opinion. From the table, the SWAT model simulates nine times using the given LULC map and climate data. The LULC map was used from 1986, 2001, and 2018 and the climate data was divided into 1986 – 1996, 199 -2007, and 2008 – 2018. The LULC map of 1986 was found in the range of 1986 -1996 climate data, the 2001 LULC map was in 1997 – 2007, and the 2018 LULC map also in 2008 – 2018 climate data. This is we said baseline scenario and the rest simulation was assumed scenarios. For more information on the simulation of LULC and climate change (for table 2), see Section 2.6.
Point 6: Strongly encourage the authors to give this manuscript serious proofreading. Maybe that is all needed to make this manuscript qualified for publication.
Response 6: Thank you very much for your feedback and encouragement on these manuscripts, which I will read again seriously and carefully in order to improve the quality of the paper for publication.
Reviewer 2 Report
The comments can be found in the attached PDF. The objectives/methods need to be improved before accepting the manuscript for publication. I have mentioned multiple suggestions in the manuscript which can help improve the quality of the manuscript.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
The author's reply to reviewers was attached in word format
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments for water-2057470
The authors have addressed the minor comments and left out the major comments, which are required to enhance the quality of the manuscript. The current manuscript cannot be accepted for publication with the same content. I haven’t found any novelty in the study and neither the analysis nor the results were new. I feel regret to inform you that the manuscript cannot be accepted without including any one of the suggestions. Furthermore, the figure 4 and 6 labels were not changed yet. They were visible in another language (not English). Also, the confusion matrix was not provided and instead, the authors provided a table that was not clear enough to understand what the authors wanted to convey from that table in response to reviewers. The authors spoke about floods, and anthropogenic impacts in the discussion, which is not at all evident from the study results. It is strongly suggested to write what the authors have found in the study. Based on the results, it can be perceived that climate is the major driver for water balance change which was proved in thousands of watersheds. There is no rapid increase in urbanization flows to compare and tie up with floods. Several sentences need to be updated to suit the observed results.
Studying the individual impacts or combined impacts using the SWAT model are very old. There is an ample amount of literature on these and this domain is saturated. These kinds of studies need to be extended with additional objectives for publishing in scientific journals. Below, I am attaching a few ideas along with suitable references. At least one should be added as an additional objective for the manuscript to be accepted for publication. Example studies were included in the previous revision comments.
1. Model the water scarcity of a basin to highlight why it is important to model the hydrological components of a watershed.
2. Include future LULC or climate change scenarios (IPCC6) and find the combined impacts of LULC and CC on water balance. The future LULC can be simulated using DynaCLUE/cellular automata/markov chain and future climate data can be found on IPCC website.
3. Compare hydrological model performance with machine learning or deep learning models. You can also develop a combined modeling approach by merging hydrological models and data-driven models.
The following comments were not addressed technically/scientifically. The authors just answered without proper reference or evidence.
What are the accuracies for the three maps? Why only 5 classes were generated? Please provide confusion matrices, accuracies and F-1 scores of the classifications either in the appendix/supplementary or in the manuscript.
Why did the NSE and R2 values drop during validation compared to calibration? If we want to test the model for further years or for future years, will the accuracies fall much higher? What are your thoughts on this?
Do authors think 0.3 and 0.8 mm increase of runoff per year matters in a watershed? This is not a temperature to worry that there is a 0.3 and 0.8-degree increase every year. I think this amount of increase is highly negligible in case of precipitation/runoff. Can authors present how much percentage increase/decrease of runoff/streamflow/baseflow was simulated from the model for better understanding?
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 2 Comments
Authors’ response to reviewers’ comments entitled Integrated and Individual Effects of Land Use/Land Cover and Climate Changes on Hydrological Flows over Birr River Watershed, Abbay Basin, Ethiopia
Manuscript ID: water-2057470
Thank you very much for your informative and helpful feedback on this manuscript. In the manuscript, I appreciate your clearly stated and well-defined remarks. All of your comments have been addressed clearly in the
- The response to reviewer 2 comments and
- The full manuscript paper
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 3
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors should modify the abstract to include a few details about IHA results.
Lines 605-611 - This is a repetition of results. The IHA results should be compared with other studies and written as a discussion instead of repeating the results. State which studies have used this method and if they observed similar non-significant patterns in their basins. Also mention what might be the reason behind these trends.
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 2 Comments
Response to the reviewer’s comments entitled Combined and Separate Effects of Land Use/Land Cover and Climate Changes on Hydrological Flows over Birr River Watershed, Abbay Basin, Ethiopia
Manuscript ID: water-2057470
Thank you again for your nice remarks on this manuscript. All of the comments were addressed below.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
