Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

line 89 - use tracks instead of crawlers

Figures 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, and 15 have unnecessarily long descriptions that are already stated in the text

Tables 1 and 2 should be titled "descriptive statistics"

line 205 - just is, not is be

When referring to ANOVA it would be good to state which variables are dependent and which are independent.

line 476 - the?

lines 518 - 523 - this problem should be addressed in supervising the construction

Overall a scientifically sound paper, with a minor correction to increase the paper's clarity.

Author Response

Thank you for valuable comments and suggestions. Please refer to the attached PDF for our reply.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

A well-written paper with good details, easy to ready and easy to follow.

1.       My main comment/suggest is the average of strength 0-100cm. In other words, the analysis assumed the soil 0-100cm is homogeneous. Would not it be more meaningful to compare soil strength and compaction at different depth, e.g. 0-30cm since that is how the construction/compaction was done. In a nutshell, the authors wanted to compare

a.       The soil strength in fill and cut area

b.       Does the soil strength increase due to “natural compaction”?

These two questions can be applied to the strength of soil in different depth

c.       soil 0-30cm,

d.       soil 30-60cm,

e.       soil 60-100cm

If the compaction was uniform along the depth, the conclusion would be the same as the average of 0-100cm.

2.       Abstract: change “ using a handy penetrometer” to “ using a handy dynamic cone penetrometer”

3.       Line 205: “Δh is be 10 cm” redundant verb.

4.       Line 510: authors should be cautious concluding that “natural compaction as time elapsed, was observed for both 510 the roadbed strength and the bearing capacity”. According to Figure 11, there is no clear trend that strength of 4.2 years is higher than the 1-year one. Figure 14 does show a trend, except C1: 2019 (2 years). However, the caution is more serious than the figures. If I understand it correctly, authors tested five or four roadway sections, which were constructed at different year, hence appeared to be at different age. This is an illusion because what authors observed is the difference between construction, not the growth of strength of any single section. If we were indeed to study the growth of strength, authors need to test the save roadway section at different ages. Only that way, were we able to conclude whether the natural compaction occurs or not. The current data is only a “coincident” in time because different sections were constructed at different times.

 

 

Author Response

Thank you for valuable comments and suggestions. Please refer to the attached PDF for our reply.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf