A Procedure for Estimating Drought Duration and Magnitude at the Uniform Cutoff Level of Streamflow: A Case of the Weekly Flows of Canadian Rivers

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This manuscript, hydrology-1768760-peer-review-v1- entitled "A Procedure for Estimating Drought Duration and Magnitude at Uniform Cutoff Level of Streamflow: A Case of Weekly Flows of Canadian Rivers," is well written and has potential, but it should be more organized. This research investigates a procedure that first estimates the drought magnitude (M), which forms the basis for estimating the drought duration or length (L).

In my opinion, a careful revision of the English language should be carried out as there currently are some unclear sentences. The study seems to be well designed. The methodology and results are technically sound. Discussions on the scientific and practical values of the study, the limitations of proposed models, and future work are meaningful. I recommend accepting this manuscript after revision. The main concerns are as follows:

1)     More recent references might support the first and second paragraphs of the introduction. Some references and literature are pretty old. There is no research reference in 2022, one for 2021 and 2020. The authors should read and use the newly published papers in their research.

2)     More literature review about the other methods is needed. The manuscript could be substantially improved by relying and citing more on recent literature about contemporary real-life case studies of clustering or suspended sediment load prediction, such as the followings.

·       Rezaei, K., & Vadiati, M. (2020). A comparative study of artificial intelligence models for predicting monthly river suspended sediment load. Journal of Water and Land Development.

·       Eskandari, E., Mohammadzadeh, H., Nassery, H., Vadiati, M., Zadeh, A. M., & Kisi, O. (2022). Delineation of isotopic and hydrochemical evolution of karstic aquifers with different cluster-based (HCA, KM, FCM and GKM) methods. Journal of Hydrology, 609, 127706.

3)     I recommend providing a table containing the advantages and disadvantages of the applied methodology based on the literature review and comparing the applied methodology and the similar methodologies.

4)     Providing a comprehensive flowchart is highly recommended by researchers, so please add a flowchart representing the methodology in the paper.

5)     Twenty-four rivers in Canada are adopted as the case study. What are other feasible alternatives? What are the advantages of adopting this case study over others in this case? How will this affect the results? The authors should provide more details on this.

6)     Please provide all software used in this study.

7)     Tab. 4 is the most important table in the manuscript, which shows the model's validation, and, unfortunately, the authors did not try to discuss it in a specific way. A comprehensive discussion emphasizing would significantly improve the paper on the table.

8)     It is better to add more error criteria to understand the model's ability better.

 

9)     A literature review could improve the comparison of the current study with previous research. 

Author Response

Please refer to the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

A Procedure for Estimating Drought Duration and Magnitude at Uniform Cutoff Level of Streamflow: A Case of Weekly Flows of Canadian Rivers

 

This is an interesting manuscript to read through. I have checked the Turnitin scores for plagiarism and found out the scores are less than 20% which is acceptable for a journal publication. Therefore, this manuscript can be moved to the review stage.

Overall, the paper is well written; however, several typos and language slips can be found from the manuscript.

Abstract is well written. However, research gap is not presented in the abstract. Therefore, authors are advice to present the research gap in the abstract and then present the research work as a novel work

Introduction - the coming which was given to the abstract is valid to the introduction as well. The research gap has not clearly presented. In addition, the authors are encouraged to enhance the recent research work in the introduction and then to compare your research work To showcase the research gap.

Background of the model - the authors haven't presented the case study using a map. It is advisable to have a catchment map for the particular river, Upper Humber River.

Data and Methods of Analysis - Can we have and overall methodology section show keys what you have done and the steps of your research work.

Results and discussion - Cn the authors present the coefficient of correlation for figure 2? that is for observed values against the modeled values. The comment is valid for figure 3 as well. In addition figure 3 can be easily incorporated to the figure 2.

Conclusions - conclusions of this manuscript have to be in strengthened currently presented conclusions are morgen Eric generic.

The manuscript looks very interesting; however, it is advised to more after which was done to the world ambient to enhance the list of references.

With these comments I would like to go with the minor revisions request for the presented manuscript.

Author Response

Please refer to the attached document.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf