Agricultural Drought-Triggering for Anticipatory Action in Papua New Guinea

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

L101: Why only PNG? Could this framework be replicated to other areas? What would that require? Please elaborate on this because it could make your excellent work global and scalable.

Explain what an SPI1 and SP3 are. Provide the indices ENSO and IOD.

L111: The authors must specify whether the crops are rainfed or not, or even if there are any crops cultivated under irrigation in PNG. If yes, this needs a further discussion and explanation on the impacts of drought on the available water resources in PNG. If irrigated crops exist, what is the season that they are established and how are they affected? 

L124: While reading the article, a certain concern on the manual stations was raised. This concern is related to the reliability of the manual measurements. Therefore, the authors should dedicate a few lines on the reliability of the manual stations and therefore their recordings.

L152-153: These lines should be written in a more clear manner.

L237: There is an extra "be" in this line. Revise the sentence.

L249: The authors say partners here, but it is unclear who the partners are. Probably a different term would be more suitable. 

L307: The AWS in Figure 1 presented in triangular marks - not rectangular.

Figure 5: These two graphs should better present the same scale (0-0.8) in the Y axis. It is misleading as it is presented. 

Figure 9: In these graphs, the legends cover part of the depicted results. Also, the drought lines, are not so distinct due to the color choice. For example brown (if any in the graphs) can not be distinguished. The same stands for the velvet - severe drought. 

L469: The measure of rain harvesting presupposes that there are rain events during this phase to collect rain. Elaborate on this proposed measure. 

Discussion and Summary:
As a commendation the next steps of your methodology could be to predict the anticipated yields with crop growth models. In this way, you could also support the government for timely calculating yield gaps and the insurance schemes - sector for timely estimating the magnitude of reimbursements.

I strongly suggest the authors to make a schematic plan or a flow chart depicting all the process. I also strongly recommend a second figure depicting all the cases that were used to validate the CDI. In this way it will be much more comprehensive for the reader.

L555: In the proposed methodology, the ML approach is always triggered? This is not made clear in the relevant section. How is it triggered and what data are used every time to correct the seasonal forecasts? 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1 The introduction section has too many paragraphs, divided into 8 paragraphs. Some of the content is too lengthy and scattered, and the overall logic needs to be strengthened. It is suggested to integrate the third paragraph into the second paragraph, and other paragraphs may be reorganized. The background, objectives, and literature review are well-documented.

2 L295: The title format is incorrect, and annotations should be provided to explain the table content instead of being placed in the title.

3 L310-311 Format error, it is recommended to explain the content of the figure separately.

4 Figure 4 Clarity needs to be improved, it is recommended to upload again. The gray line in the picture is the prediction line? It is recommended to indicate it in the picture and indicate it as -0.5.

5 L386: Figure 5 should be consistent with Figures 4 and 6, with the addition of predictive ability markers in the figure.

6 The discussion section needs improvement. This study provides a lot of explanation on the preparation work of AA, but lacks a description of the practical significance of its results. The advantage of the first paragraph compared to other studies is that it has a larger amount of data, which I believe is not a convincing reason.

7 Please reduce the length of the conclusion. Focus on practical implications of your key findings.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Some sentences need to be improved, See the comments for authors.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf