Impacts of Hurricane Michael on Watershed Hydrology: A Case Study in the Southeastern United States

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This manuscript analyzed the influence of hurricanes on watershed hydrology. It does not have any obvious scientific questions, only requires clarifying some concepts and adding more information.

1.     Line 31: Please use alphabetical order to arrange these keywords.

2.     Line 30-41: Figure 1 is a nice figure. But it is too difficult to read the text, please make the text larger. Same question for figure 10.

3.     Paragraphs 1 and 2 of the introduction have similar statements, please restructure the two paragraphs.

4.     Can you quantify the hurricane severity?

5.     The discussion is insufficient. It is necessary to discuss the lagged effects of hurricanes on forest recovery. The leaching of soil nutrients (Sun et al. 2022). Hurricanes can also impact tree growth by changing the soil (Paz et al. 2018).

6.     Delete “human infrastructure” in the conclusion. There is no analysis related to human infrastructure.

Sun, J., Wei, X., Zhou, Y., Chan, C., & Diao, J. (2022). Hurricanes Substantially Reduce the Nutrients in Tropical Forested Watersheds in Puerto Rico. Forests, 13(1), 71.

Paz, H., Vega-Ramos, F., & Arreola-Villa, F. (2018). Understanding hurricane resistance and resilience in tropical dry forest trees: A functional traits approach. Forest Ecology and Management, 426, 115-122.

Author Response

Thanks so much for reviewing and giving feedback! I was able to incorporate almost all of your suggestions (increasing font size, deleting unnecessary words, restructuring paragraphs, and adding information on lagging impacts). Just a few questions for clarification:

In your statement "It does not have any obvious scientific questions", were you suggesting that I state our hypothesis more clearly/plainly, or did you mean you didn't have any obvious questions about the manuscript? 

To your question, "Can you quantify hurricane severity?", we used damage assessment reports from each of the three states the hurricane impacted. Some additional clarification on this comment would help me to make appropriate edits to the manuscript. 

Thanks again!

Reviewer 2 Report

This is one of the few studies of how hurricanes affect vegetation and catchment hydrology. It combines a wide range of remote sensing, hydrological monitoring and modelling techniques to provide an interesting, thorough and sound analysis of the effects of a large hurricane on forest cover and streamflow. There are a few very minor typographical errors and other minor changes suggested below:

Line 99, damage, not damages

Lines 99-107, units should be metric: wind speed in km/hour not knots; storm surge heights in metres, not feet; precipitation in mm, not inches; forest area in km² or hectares, not acres.

Lines 108 and 168, km². Not “square kilometers”

Line 133, add (d) after “River”. i.e. the figure caption refers to images a, b and c but not image d.

Lines 264-266, says that Figure 4 is showing data using the MODIS remote sensing product, but Figure 4 is actually showing Sentinel-2 NDVI. Should this read “Figure 5” here?

Lines 302-303, the wording here does not make sense

Line 329 “.” Missing after “ET”

Line 400-402, make it clear here that this is the hypothesized cause. It is not based on measurements of these Et components in the study area.

Author Response

Thanks so much for reviewing and offering great feedback! I was able to incorporate all of your suggestions. Thank you for catching the typographical errors. I was able to clean up/add verbiage to sections to help clarify the points being made. Thank you for the interest in the area of study.