Hydrometeorological Trends in a Low-Gradient Forested Watershed on the Southeastern Atlantic Coastal Plain in the USA

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In this presented manuscript, the author(s) have investigated the “long-term” hydrometeorological trends. The length of the data set is declared as 17 years in the manuscript. First of all, before starting the line-by-line evaluation, I would like to say that I would not call the 17 years of data long-term hydrologically. 17 years of data is just a case of short-term evaluation in the case of hydrometeorological trends. Without prejudice to this objection, I think that hydrometeorological trend studies are very important, especially after the effects of global climate change have become more frequent in recent years. I have the following suggestions for the authors step by step,

-The abstract is too long. It will be better to keep it briefer.

- Check the keywords. I suggest using fewer keywords. And the last keyword has a “dot” between the previous one.

-I strictly recommend changing the flow of the manuscript. It may be useful to classify the titles as Introduction, Background, and related work, etc. However, in that case, it just looks confusing. I suggest adding titles 2 and 3 to the introduction section. And it is going to be better to share only necessary and related previous studies. So many studies are shared in this form, and I am not sure if it is all necessary. It is also an important point of confusion.

-The information about the data collection can be given in a table. Each sub-title can be a column of the table. It would be easier for readers to understand the length and specifications of the records.

-In line 296, what do you mean by “obtained using all ½ hrly daily readings”?

- The table 1 must be re-sized. It looks bigger than usual.

- The same sizing problem is in Table 2.

- Why did you end up with the manuscript as the “6. Perspectives”? There are so many shared results in the results section; however, the relationship between the results is not explained clearly. I suggest adding a discussion section to the end of the results and removing the “perspectives” section. The authors should consider adding a conclusion section to the end of the manuscript to summarize the whole study. As I mentioned in the previous comments, due to the number of investigated parameters and the methods used, the manuscript is confusing in its current form, and it does not clarify any of the trends.

As a final comment, I think the manuscript has important findings as it belongs to a specific area. However, there is a serious lack of organizations. The manuscript must be rewritten in a more scientific way by using fewer subtitles and sharing only significant outputs.   

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1.

Thank you very much for your very constructive comments and suggestions in our manuscript. We believe, we have incorporated most of your comments complying with those comments and we hope that it is satisfactory. Our full responses to your all comments are in attached Response file. Thank you.

Devendra M Amatya

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript entitled “Long-term Hydro-Metrologic trends of a low-gradient forested watershed on the Southeastern Atlantic Coastal Plain” utilized the long-term data in scientifically answering the effect of climate change in hydrology, peak discharges in stormwater management and infrastructure design and in forecasting the events. There are some suggestions added before the final publication of the manuscript. Please have a look at the comments and suggestions.

1.     Although the authors mentioned the land use and added the information on land cover, I suggest the authors add the actual changing land use pattern of Turkey Creek and if possible, some highlights on changes in the drainage pattern, and change in the forest cover. Also, support the discussions made in line no. 846-849.

2.     Line no. 213. The authors are suggested to mentioned to add a detail on the soil type. From the general observation, the area seems to be dominated by limestone deposits below 13-20m, the shallow groundwater in the current manuscript runs up to 2.5m which is governed by gravel, sand and gravel, or sandy clay. Please specify the type of aquifer materials in each of the locations. From the graph (Figure 9) the locations seem to have heterogeneous soil types.

3.     Line no. 273. Please check the structure of the sentence.

4.     Please modify Figure no. add a land use land cover map (build-up and forested area) instead of using Google map for a clear indication of the area.

5.     Please have a thorough look at the citation pattern.

Minor corrections of grammatical errors.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 2,

Thank you very much for your constructive comments and suggestions on our manuscript. We believe, we have incorporated them in our revised manuscript and hope they are satisfactory. Our responses to all your individual comments are in the attached Response document. Thank you very much.

Devendra M Amatya

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Review Manuscript: Long-Termin Hydro-Meteorological Trends of a Low-Gradient Forested Watershed on the Southeastern Atlantic Coastal Plain.

Written by Amatya et al., 2024

To be submitted to “Hydrology” MDPI

I have read the manuscript “Long-Termin Hydro-Meteorological Trends of a Low-Gradient Forested Watershed on the Southeastern Atlantic Coastal Plain” by Amatya et al., 2024, submitted to the journal “hydrology”. I generally think that the analysis was interesting and that the manuscript was well written. Below I have provided general and specific remarks that I have collected while reading the manuscript.

General remarks:

1.       Objectives - In general, the authors sometimes only mention objectives and other times science questions that they want to answer. I have the feeling that both components could be better aligned to one another. Particularly, since there are some aims mentioned after the introduction, there is a separate section (3) on objectives, which I found slightly confusing.  

 What is the main question to be answered here? What is the main objective? What more specific questions/ objectives are followed to get to this bigger goal? I feel like the authors could elaborate more deeply on this to improve the quality of the manuscript.

2.       Text - The text contains some quite lengthy sentences (see detailed remarks), where one should definitely consider shortening – to make the parts of the manuscript easier to read. I would definitely encourage the authors to think about this and other remarks I propose below.

3.       Table/Graphs Style - Table and graph style are partly quite variable through the manuscript. I would encourage the authors to make a more common style of graphs for the manuscript. If this is not realistic for the current manuscript, I would encourage the authors to do this in future publications. Some graphs seem to be not in their original “shape”, as e.g. in Figure 11 and 12. I would propose to stick with the width-height settings of the figure when importing them. Additionally, it would probably be good to improve the layout of the figures in the manuscript.

4.       Focus of analysis – I generally think that the authors have providing an interesting analysis based on their long-term precipitation, discharge, (indirect) evapotranspiration and groundwater data. Here, I mainly propose to improve the presentation (visually) of the results.

Detailed remarks

5.       Abstract, Line 12 – 15: “Long-term monitoring …. Uncertainties”. This part of the abstract highlights multiple reasons for doing long term hydrological monitoring. Some of them are very specific (relationship between processes and services), whereas others are relatively unclear and unspecific (e.g. allow for trend, model validation). These more unclear and unspecific aims would benefit from rewriting to more purpose oriented reasons for doing long term studies (predictability of models in what regard, trend analysis for what purpose?). I think the sentence here is unnecessarily long and could be rebuild into 2-3 lines to explain why trend detection/ model validation? For what bigger purpose?

6.       Abstract, Line 26: “Runoff occurred 76.4% of days…”. Please rephrase and add information on the meaning of 76.4% - do you mean 76.4% of all days in the year? Over what period?  I think the information about the no flow conditions could be either omitted or put into a separate sentence.

7.       Abstract, Line 28: “Subsurface (base) flow contributed 23-47% to total runoff and..”. Are the authors 100% sure that we are looking at subsurface flow?

8.       Abstract, Line 31 - 34: “Onsite precipitation-intensity-duration-frequencies (PIDF) as well as … respectively.” Any reader that has not read the article will have difficulty what the comparison is made to? Is this based on other data from a similar area? Is this based on another reference period? What are the NOAA and USGS data really about? This does not become really clear from the current sentence (same location? timeframe?). I recommend the authors to put this into perspective.

9.       Abstract, Line 34 – 39: “Integrated analysis …. Coastal watersheds.” I find the proposed purposes of the dataset interesting, but as far as I understood the dataset analysis does not contain any chemical/ water quality assessment. Therefore, I was wondering if the further purposes of the dataset should be not rather put into a quantitative water assessment perspective. Alternative, the authors could point out the availability of such additional information (water quality) to make such analyses possible.

10.   Keywords, Line 42 and 42: Is the name of the creek (later mentioned as Turkey Creek) capitalized or not? Also, there is a “.” (dot) between events and ecosystem functions (line 42).     

11.   Introduction, Line 44: “This article analyzed recent 17 years…”. I propose the authors rephrase the sentence: “This article… 17 years of recent hydrometeorological data (YEARS)”. They can even put the years of data that were analyzed in parentheses.

12.   Introduction, Line 51: “ …were assumed to recover after Hugo’s impact…”. I recommend the authors to add here that we are talking about the hurricane Hugo. This is not clear in the text here. Would be great if the authors can add it (so the reader does not need to look at the list of references if he/ she is not familiar with that hurricane).

13.   Introduction, Line 52 – 58. I generally like the objectives here, but would propose to rewrite it slightly to make it easier to read as the overall aim is “understanding the hydrology of the system under climate change”. Related to that, several parts of the system are addressed and separately looked at. If the article first described the bigger aim and then the sub-objectives,  the text will probably be easier to read (especially having less lengthy sentences). 

14.   Background…, Line 62 – 63: “Emmett (2022) … Southeastern US”. Not very clear what the authors mean here. Forest clearing was one of the greatest disturbances…
(1) for which time period?

(2) for what system (hydrology, ecosystem..)

(3) in what context?

Somehow, a little bit more context would be nice here.

15.   Background…, Line 80 – 87:” Long-term hydrologic…Tetzlaff et al., 2017).   “ Consider rephrasing this paragraph. First of all, this just contains one single sentence. Second of all, this sentence is very long to read.

16.   Background, Line 126 – 127:” This was particularly addressed  … Amatya et al., (2022a) study.” I propose to remove the word “study” here at its current position. Either write “this was particularly addressed in studies by … and … or use another way to rephrase rephrasing…

17.   Background, Line 135 – 145:” Three studies…. 2016).” I would propose to consider rewriting this sentence into smaller parts. This makes it easier to grasp for the reader. Especially since there are very different aims mentioned here. Plus, in the end it should be clear how these questions relate to the current study.

18.   Project objectives – I think this information is partly already covered in the introduction. I am not 100% sure if everything is 100% aligned here. Either the text in sections 1 and to should lead to the objectives presented in part 3. Otherwise, I could also imagine the objectives being part of section 1 (Introduction). One way or another, it is important that things are clear for the reader here and things are not potentially double mentioned in the manuscript.

19.   Materials and Methods, Line 166: “This paper presents the analysis of data collected from 2005 to 2021”. Can the authors provide a reason for analyzing this particular time period? Is there a reason behind it? At least one could write something about the variability in climate/ meteo conditions that are presented in there. 

20.   Figure 1: Turkey Creek Watershed: This figure contains text that is very small (e.g. station name abbreviations are not very readable). It would also be good if the authors would explain the meaning of the station abbreviations in the caption. Also, the caption should state the source of the background image that you have used in this figure.  

21.   4.2.1 Precipitation: Perhaps rather an idea for future work. If there is only data from the Lotti Road station for 2005, could relationships

22.   between this station and the station @ Turkey Creek (for the other years) be used to correct for potential bias in the data of 2005? I would assume it is too much work and time to do this work for the current manuscript, but would think this is potentially something worthwhile to do for that specific year.

23.   4.3 Data analysis, Line 284 – 287: “All hydrological variables for rainfall…” Not entirely sure about this sentence (“for”). Part of the hydrological variables were just monitored others were derived. Suggest rephrasing here.

24.   Line 302: “ when the soils are relatively wetter…” rephrase and keep past tense if used in the methods section in the manuscript.

25.   Line 321 -322:” Pettitt test was employed… water table data”. I think the test cannot detect anything per definition. It can however be used to check on the significance. Suggest rephrasing sentence here.

26.   Line 329 – 330: “Libiseller, C. and Grimvall, A., 2002”. Check for consistency in referencing style.

27.   Line 345: “ the EV modelling approach…”. Explain what this abbreviation (extreme value modelling approach) stands for and how it’s different from GEV, which is preferred here.

28.   Line 369: “ with those obtained from the USCS…”. In this regard, it would be great to know if there the same data source(s) was/were used. This should probably be described in the cited publication, but it would be great to mention here.

29.   Table 1: The table has one “Mm” in it.

30.   Figure 7: Would it not be interesting to make such a curve for the different years to see the shift of different flow frequencies during the different years (if there is any)?

Figure 10: Legend within figure is very small. Propose increasing the font size of this figure.

The text is well written, but could be improved by deleting some very long sentences and following (some of) the remarks ....

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 3,

Thank you very much for your constructive comments and suggestions on our manuscript. We believe, we have incorporated them in our revised manuscript and hope they are satisfactory. Our responses to all your individual comments are in the attached Response document. Thank you very much.

Devendra M Amatya

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I have checked the manuscript and I agree that most of the comments are addressed and my concerns are answered by the authors. 

Author Response

References have been checked and the manuscript reviewed for any format, spelling, or grammar issues.