The Interactive Impact of Building Diversity on the Thermal Balance and Micro-Climate Change under the Influence of Rapid Urbanization

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper combines multiple techniques to investigate the local climate in Wuhan. This integrated approach is its strongest point, in the opinion of this reviewer. However, there are several aspects that need substantial improvement:

- details about the network of weather stations that produced the data used in the study. Location of stations, instruments, etc.

- you cannot plot a trend of relative humidity with time as it depends on temperature. You may consider specific or absolute humidity. Other studies who analyzed the humidity conditions in the urban environment considered specific humidity (e.g., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2016.11.018)

- you have mobile observations. The information on it in the methods section is missing.

- Fig. 7 and 8 need to be drastically improved. What's on the x-axis?

- Fig. 6 error bars?

From the discussion section, I understand that there is potential in your approach, but the materials and methods section shall be substantially improved, as the presentation of the results. Without these recommended improvements, the reader cannot understand what has been done, exactly, and thus understand your work.

As you combine multiple techniques, it might prove difficult to include all details in the main manuscript; thus, please consider a supplementary information section, if allowed by the journal.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

Please find the attached response to the reviewer’s comments in PDF.

Actually, we just were able to upload  "response to the reviewer’s comments as PDF" and there is no option for submitting the manuscript so that we just attached everything necessary within this PDF.

best regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper describes a method of measuring the impact of rapid urbanisation on the thermal balance of a city. Comments for the authors are as follows:

-The meaning of "building diversity" has to be defined in the Abstract and the introduction and ideally changed to reflect what the authors have studied. What does it refer to? Architectural style? Material usage? Form? Volume? In plain terms the reader cannot understand what your research tries to accomplish. You have to define that building diversity in your research relates to the height of the buildings.

- The scope of the paper is unclear. After the "introduction" 2-3 paragraphs should precede the methods that you describe. These paragraphs should clearly state what your research tries to accomplish and the methods that show the roadmap of your research.

- The methods described in lines 90-112 should be part of 2.1 and not the introduction. Furthermore, references are missing from these steps.

- References needed for the four steps described in 2.1. It is not clear if this is your work or work of others.

- The Navier-Stokes equations are missing in lines 164-169

- Table 1 should have references on how the constants were verified

- Line 158, you should describe what a classified block is.

- In lines 176-177 you mention different types of block morphology, but you do not mention that anywhere in the paper before.

- Reference needed for Figure 2

- Table 2 should be redeveloped and explain what the number in parentheses are in the "building types" columns. My guess is storeys. Also the building density, plot ratio and greenery ratio should be defined as i.e. built up area to plot area etc.

- The graphs in section 4.1 need reference for their data

- Figure 5 in my opinion should be presented as a bar graph and not a line graph.

- In figure 6 it would be interesting to see another average temperature and humidity that corresponds to a larger area, so that you can compare the % of climate change and optimise your results.

- In section 4.2 you present results that were measured on the street level in the different types of blocks. However, in the park block you measure temperatures from inside the park which are definitely lower. The authors need to describe why they decided to use a point source and not a road source like the other three cases with a supportive argument. Also the record time in Figure 7 should state what it is. You mention "daytime air temperature" but not the time scale. The same applies to Figure 8.

- In section 4.3 you exclude the park from the CFD simulation results? Why?

- In lines 434-435 it is not clear how you derive to the conclusion.

- In lines 436-437 you mention "comfort zone" but no mention of it is calculated before in the paper.

- In line 438 you mention building density as the most important indicator but in line 441 you add plot ratio. Please define.

- The conclusion does not state something entirely different than the previous section named discussion. The authors could mix the two as a concluding statement.

Author Response

Dear reviewer 

The file has been attached. Please check the response to the reviewer’s comments which is attached as PDF file.

It was no option for the manuscript, so we added necessary details toward the answers within the attached file.

best regard.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

All the major concerns have been dealt with by the Authors. I would only recommend to further improve the figures that you produced with Excel. Your work deserves a better presentation.