Changed Seasonality and Forcings of Peak Annual Flows in Ephemeral Channels at Flagstaff, Northern Arizona, USA

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This manuscript collected flood data measured by different organizations. Several data sets were incomplete. Data have been organized and thoroughly analyzed. Particular attention has been paid to geologic and topographic controls. Moreover, climate change, urbanization and wildfire effects have been addressed. Overall, understanding of discharge in ephemeral channels of the study region has been very much improved. This is important for management issues.

 

Next I’m providing some minor remarks, which could help to improve this manuscript.

First, Introduction section is realtively short in my opinion.

Second, there are some redundancies along the text. For example, Lines 98 to100 and 200 to 202, related to Flagstaff airport meteorological data

Third conclusions could be tightened up, as several citations are included in this sections. I would recommend to include in the Discussion section several sentences, namely, Lines 537 to 542 annd Lines 550 to 553; otherwise citations could be avoided in the Conclusions section.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I would like to preface that the contents of the manuscript are at the border (maybe beyond) of my expertise area. Therefore, my comments may not fit appropriately to the typology of the present article.

In my opinion, the contents of the paper are mainly descriptive and the climatologic analysis relies on a dataset that could result as weak to support a robust investigation about flood variability related to climatology variations in the study area.

I wonder about the scientific soundness of these contents for an international reader of the journal. I mean, which hints can a scientist find for own research in this article? No novel approaches are proposed and the statistical analysis is quite basic.

Many conjectures are described relating outcomes from the statistical analysis to correspondences of past studies (I refer to many “may” and “can” used throughout the manuscript, especially in section 5.3), but (in my opinion) the limited and discontinuous dataset does not allow to support the statements robustly. In addition, I wonder if it should be more proper to talk about “variations in the climatology of the investigated area” rather than “climate change” throughout the manuscript.

Taking into account the introductory note, on the one hand, if the aforementioned comments are valid, I believe that the present manuscript does not deserve to be published. On the other hand, if the contents of the present manuscript fits adequately the aims of editors of the special issue, the current version of the manuscript can be published as it is.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Please see attached my review report

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Authors have clarified some features of their research in the revised manuscript. On the one hand, my general doubts highlighted in the first report are still present. On the other hand, as mentioned in the previous step of the review process, the contents of the manuscript are at the border (maybe beyond) of my expertise area. Therefore, my opinion may not fit appropriately to the typology of the present article.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for your responses. I do not have any other comment