Establishing and Operating (Pilot Phase) a Telemetric Streamflow Monitoring Network in Greece

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Interesting topic also present in France. Your paper highligthts almost as many organisation and funds problem than scientific problems.

Line 36 about ref [1] --> LInes 539 to 549 : what's that?

Line 38 : what do you man by high technology? The materials you describe are rather improved ones and not so high tech. I suggest you discuss more about that.

Lines 51 to 55 : see previous remark

Line 73 : long discussion about measuring and estimating, please precise what you mean by estimating (vs measuring)

Lines 85 - 87 : please give more info about this project and the feed back you can provide.

Line 97 - 98 : what do you mean by high quality?

FIgures 1, 2: add scales and orientation and catchment limits

Line 125 to 130 : add climate info please

Line 135 to 145 : listing all the parameters to be satisfied and the ponderation you have chosen would be a +

Fig 3 : how do you manage cloggings? We used a camera (see Larrarte et al, FMI, 2020) to watch our instrumentation)

Table 2 criteria to select apparatus would be a + (range, price, whatever)

Lines 316 - 333 : please precise what you did, why, the standart, ... A bit like in an Hauet's paper :)

Figure 7 : add arrows betwween a and b and a and c to precise what is what (be pedagogic)

Lines 439 - 443 : not really surprising, there are a lot of papers about velocity distribution. Even some proposing to complete or give alternativesto the Coles law. You may be interested by Lassabatere et al, Journal oh Hydraulic Eng, 2013, as an example.

Fig 9  : explain what the equation is, about log law give the eq you use in the text

 

 

 

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

In this paper, the authors introduced their newly installed streamflow monitoring network, HYDRONET.

 

Although I would like to express my respect to the authors who made a tremendous effort to install and maintain the streamflow monitoring network, I cannot agree that this paper can be published as an original article. There are no scientific questions and no original contributions in this paper. The authors explain every single detail of their HYDRONET and I think none of them is new. Technical innovations of their equipment are unclear. I recommend the authors to elaborate more to clarify the advantage of HYDRONET against the conventional sensors by intensively comparing them. It is extremely unclear for me why 50% cost reduction is realized in their system. In addition, the authors should have clarified that the quality of their new sensor system is comparable to the conventional ones by installing both.

 

 

Specific comments:

L14-15: I think there are grammatical errors in this sentence. I could not understand it.

L167: I guess that the authors would like to say, “as seen in Figure 3”. Similar errors exist in many places of the manuscript.

L388: Section 3.2. seems to be method (not results).

 

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

General comment: In this paper a pilot hydro-telemetric network was developed to estimate river discharge in the Greek basins. The topic is important because we need of low cost monitoring systems to estimate hydrological variables in data-scarce environments. The infrastructure seems promising for continuous, non-intrusive and freely accessible discharge estimates. The article is mostly technical and can be useful for emerging river monitoring infrastructures. I recommend the authors to incorporate the following points before publication of their manuscript.

Specific comments:

Point 1) Section 1: Introduction. The authors would briefly clarify the added value of their prototype in terms of scientific and technical innovations respect to other experiences in literature.

Point 2) Section 2. Line 193. The authors would specify how the information is provided when the internet connection is not available or not fast enough to transfer data.

Point 3) Section 2. Line 209. It is not clear how the authors validate the data from river stations. Please argue this point.

Point 4) Section 3: Line 341. The authors refer about their cost-effective infrastructure with lower by about 50% respect to other commercial stations. Can you provide an example of cost for these sensors?

Point 5) Section 3: Line 367. It is not clear if fixed camera is used only for video surveillance purposes or also to derive remotely surface velocities or other variables of interest. Please clarify this point.

Point 6) Section 3. Data loss in sensor networks can represent a relevant issue for real time discharge monitoring (e.g. Figure 10b). How this problem is tackled?

Point 7) Section 3. The definition of f_v entropy parameter requires efforts because of the variability in space of the hydraulic and morphological characteristics of river reaches. Please discuss this point in the final section.

Point 8)  Do the authors intend to make codes available in an open-access repository?

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

A appreciate the improvement of your manuscript. And it makes me want to visit your country.

About fig 1, I realize that a time information would be more pertinent than a distance one (your country is rather montaneous).

About estimating, a discharge is calculated. Here a discussion occured some years ago about estimating and measuring. The frontier may be on quantifying or not the uncertainties. I would be a plus if you could comment that.

About Lassabatere et al, I can not solve your downloading trouble but this one is very similar and supposed to be free access

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1051/lhb/2010036

I am very carefull with entropy, I really prefer "traditionnal" measurement methods.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

I understood that the authors did not develop a new sensor. That’s why I think this paper cannot be published. The authors just introduce a commercially available sensor and have no scientific questions in this paper. This SI says, “The aim of the present Special Issue is to promote the identification of the most innovative new solutions for river monitoring that can be used to increase our knowledge on water availability and control extreme events.”. Although I agree that the authors’ work fits this scope, their work cannot be “the most innovative new solutions” in the academic context because it has already been commercially available. In the previous round, I intended to find some scientific questions in this paper. For instance, the authors could answer if the observation accuracy can be maintained with substantially reducing the cost. It can be the scientific question. I just wanted to ask the authors to find some new scientific findings, which I believe that the editors of this SI require. I still believe that this paper cannot be accepted. However, I do not intend to oppose the other reviewers’ suggestions and the editor’s decision.

Author Response

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