Application of Satellite Remote Sensing in Monitoring Elevated Internal Temperatures of Landfills

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

It is a paper of high quality and appropraite for the journal.

Author Response

See attached summary of responses to all the peer reviewers of the draft manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a very interesting and novel study about an important topic, namely the subsurface smouldering and fires of landfills. I also haven’t read about the remote monitoring of landfill fires in the literature. Many paper deals with remote monitoring of surface temperatures but so far not related to fires. The developed evaluation method is also novel and smart. Figs. 9 and 10 illustrate it well, that after the developed simple average normalisation and applied standard deviation technique the resulted figures are easy to understand. The trace of movement of fires is also interesting. The paper is almost ready to go; only some minor improvement is necessary.

Remarks:

Line 20-21: Please explain why a landfill gas extraction system controls the temperature inside of the landfill. Actually I think landfill gas is the scientific term instead of gas.

Line 113-114: Please separate the info of temperature and gas and clarify the text here. It is not clear for me if there are temperature wells (rather heat wells) on that location, namely a heat exchanger pipeline to extract (or insert) heat from the landfill is installed or not.

Line 149-151: Consider: digital resolution is 8 bits for the TM and 16 bits for the OLI and TIRS. The nominal range would be also interesting and the sensitivity (nominal range over resolution).

Line 269: Please differentiate the two terms: elevated temperature because of biochemical decomposition and elevated temperature because of subsurface smouldering or fire. Short name the two and use them consistently throughout the paper. This way this paper will be consistent with other “heat management” papers.

Literature summary should be complement a little:

Some words might be good about the physical and thermal properties of wastes affecting heat transfer and fire ignition. This paper might be cited:

Faitli, J., Magyar, T., Erdélyi, A. & Murányi, A. (2015) Characterization of thermal properties of municipal solid waste landfills. Waste Management, 36, pp. 213-221.

A simplified theoretical heat transfer model for MSW landfills is given in this paper:

Faitli J., Magyar T., Romenda R., Erdélyi A., Boldizsár Cs. (2017) Chapter 9. Laying the Foundation for Engineering Heat Management of Waste Landfills. In: Norma, Chandler (ed.) Landfills: Environmental Impacts, Assessment and Management. Hauppauge (NY), USA, Nova Science Publishers, pp. 215-244.

This is interesting because there is a reference that satellite image data was used to prove this model that heat generated by biochemical decomposition can go to the surroundings of the landfill (Check Your paper at line 191).

Mahmood, K., Adila Batool, S. & Nawaz Chaudhry, M. (2016). Studying bio-thermal effects at and around MSW dumps using Satellite Remote Sensing and GIS. Waste Management, 55, 118-128.

Please consider to cite the previous paper for this term: “heat management of landfills” because the fire and smouldering problem is related also, if You like it.

Author Response

See attached summary to all the peer reviewers of the draft manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

This is a very interesting and highly relevant manuscript based on sound data analysis of remote sensing data. Important methodology to study potentially hazardous areas. Very carefully grafted manuscript which is good to read and points out the relevant facts and conclusion as well as the context very clearly. Methods  up-to date and adequate to research question. No further comments

Author Response

See attached summary to all the peer reviewers comments of the draft manuscript.