Study on Dynamic Early Warning of Flash Floods in Hubei Province

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This study deals with the development of an early warning system for flash floods. The article is well-written and interesting for the journal audience. The major comments need to be addressed by the authors are the following.

Line 48. Add some comments justifying the improvements and the reliability of such approaches. The last years the improvements of weather prediction models at finer spatial scale and prediction reliability had lead to the development of forecasting and nowcasting systems. In such approaches researchers highlighted that coupling of WRF with hydrological models can provide useful insights and predict a disaster some days before its occurrence (https://doi.org/10.1002/met.2079, https://doi.org/10.3390/w14081192).

In the last paragraph, highlight the novel points of your approach and the research gap makes author to investigate this subject.

Line 270. Increase the scale in figure 6.

Line 310. The axis labels in figure 8 cannot read. Please increase.

Table 3. It is bias to have different number of episodes in each sites?

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

Thank you for presenting your research on dynamic early warning of flash floods in Hubei Province.

Please take into consideration the following comments in improving the manuscript:

I suggest introducing the new column in Table 1 after column “description”, which would be named source of data, which is quite important. In this table dates are not fine in the 5th row.

Where is the river and its tributaries in the Figure 1? Please add it.

Please explain „precipitation correction“ in Figure 4.

Line 36: I suggest „that could“ instead „that will help“.

Line 179: correct „Analysis“ to analysis.

Insert free line after Tables 3, 4 and 5.

Please check fonts of subtitles in Figure 10 as well as in the Conclusions.

Please format the reference list according to the instructions for authors. For example, use journal abbreviations (not used in lines 503, 519, 525).

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

1)            The topic approached is very important and shows the timeliness of this article.

2)            The abstract is convincing, yet I would have expected that the information about the results (line 22) would be after those regarding the method.

3)            In the last paragraph of the Introduction (from line 92) there is a clear presentation of the motivation; a more explicit statement about the paper contributions would also be useful.

4)            The color code in Figure 1 should be more explicit; see Legend where the red dot is very small and please specify whether it represents any village or a riverside village.  

5)            Similarly in Figure 2, not clear the part of the legend about city boundary and its correspondence on the map.

6)            The 10 rivers mentioned on line 149 should be named / enumerated.

7)            Concerning the data described in Section 2.2 Data Collection  – how were they originated and what was the access policy for them? How have they become available to the researchers?

8)            How were the empirical thresholds determined?

9)            Section 2.2 Modelling Approaches is actually Section 2.3 ?

10)          Section 2.2.1 (Dynamic rainfall… )does not explain all the notions and the steps from Figure 3.

11)          The method should be described more precisely, including mathematical formulas for the main metrics, not only textual explanations. Nonetheless, it is not clear enough if there is a contribution concerning the method or only for its application.

12)          When describing the method, one should be more specific on the data used for different steps of the method - when historical data were processed vs. when data from 2021-2022 were used. Some information is given in the Conclusion, but this is useful earlier in the paper.

13)          Line 216 – predicate missing.

14)          Line 254-255 – How were the critical early warning thresholds computed?

15)          A general question is also how early should be the early warning in this context, i.e.,  what is early enough from the point of view of the affected stakeholders and (at least conceptually) how these warnings have the chance to reach the people interested about them?

16)          How were the values from Table 4 computed?

17)          The resolution of Figure 9 should be improved.

18)          Line 356 – do you mean here the number of early warnings that were not false? If this is the case, it would be a plus to mention it. What is the chance to get false warnings? Was there a comparison with real-life events? This aspect should be evident from the method description.

19)          The font on lines 434 – 440 should be revised.

20)          The description of the risk model of flash-flood disaster needs improvement.

Author Response

Please see the attachment. Thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors addressed all the reviewer comments and i suggest the acceptance of the manuscript 

Author Response

Thank you

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

I checked corrected manuscript which I recommend for publishing in Waters.

Kind regards

Author Response

Thank you.