Comprehensive Hydrological Analysis of the Buha River Watershed with High-Resolution SHUD Modeling

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The comments are included in the adjunct document 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you for your constructive comments. Please see the attachment of our reply.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The paper "Comprehensive Hydrological Analysis of the Buha River Watershed with High-Resolution SHUD Modeling" presents a detailed study of the hydrological dynamics of the Buha River watershed, a critical tributary of Qinghai Lake, using the Simulator for Hydrologic Unstructured Domains (SHUD) model and China Meteorological Forces Dataset (CMFD) from 1979 to 2018. The study highlights consistent upward trends in precipitation and temperature, the accuracy of the SHUD model in simulating streamflow (especially on the monthly scale), fluctuating runoff ratios, spatial alterations in water balance, and the significant contribution of snow accumulation to streamflow. The research emphasizes the importance of improving dataset accuracy and model parameter optimization for future regional studies.

I think the study has a topic that is suitable for this journal. The article is stylistically, formally well-written, and understandable for its potential reader. However, with the present accent to be a case study, it is missing the main interesting aspect expected from this author collective. Most of the co-authors created the model used in this study, and even though they have already published articles describing the model itself in more detail, I expected this work to be not only a case study but also more focused on the presentation of SHUD software. Folks from China may also be interested in this particular watershed. Still, for many people (like me), paper is in this present form just quite a standard analysis of some watershed on the other side of the Earth.

Here are some of my suggestions and remarks that aim to assist authors in improving their work:

-          It would be helpful if various studies already made in this area will be compared, maybe best in tabular form

-          Data used in the present study and their sources are described in Table 1. I think it would be helpful for the reader (for the sake of having a more general benefit from reading this paper) if, e.g., minimum requirements for input data for a task like the one presented here would also be presented.

-          Lines 138 and 139 mention other modelling tools suitable for solved tasks. It would be very interesting to compare at least one computation from these alternative models with SHUD. I think this can help potential readers select this model for their own work. An interesting comparison can be regarding the precision of the task and computational time necessary for running the model. Maybe a comparison with some conceptual model would be interesting, which is quite simple to accomplish (e.g., some conceptual models are in R, which authors use in their work.

-          Although, as I already wrote, the authors of the article also wrote other works describing SHUD, I would still consider it appropriate for the reader to explain some things in this article as well - for example, the snow routine or the calculation of current evapotranspiration is not entirely clear from the article.

I apologize if this review reflected my interests because I really like the author's work, so I look at it from the point of view of a possible user of their software and wish the authors much success in their work.

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

English is ok

Author Response

Thank you for your constructive comments. Please see the attachment of our reply.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf