Effects of Different Socioeconomic Development Levels on Extreme Precipitation Events in Mainland China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Review Comments:sustainability-1919595
The paper reports the Effects of Different Site-Scales on Extreme Precipitation Events 2 in Mainland China. The paper fails to establish any new or interesting finding that would warrant its publication in the Sustainability. This is immediately clear when one reads the abstract section(use of 18 years of data for the establishment of extreme precipitation indices), which is a collection of obvious/general statements, rather than a set of new findings that derive from an original analysis. There are various problems with the approach and the methods are not well explained. There is no logical discussion in this manuscript. Explanations of methods are inadequate. Overall, I recommend major revision
The work reported suffers from several major limitations
The writing and English need thorough polishing. Numerous grammatical and rhetorical issues too.
Authors should provide better and more current literature in the field. Moreover, the authors used 18 years data for the calculation of precipitation indices,which seems insufficient,authors have to justify it.
I have many concerns about the introduction section.I think that if the authors wish this paper is well considered by experts, more attention should be devoted to discuss the application scenarios.non-inclusiveliterature review related to topics such as precipitation extreme indices. In essence,the introduction is short and boring.Moreover,the introduction and methodology section need to re-write as these sections are lacking clarity and sufficient motivations. I suggest to improve them or better explain with realistic examples.
The methodology is not described in brief.Authors must describe the methods in detail.What criteria they have adopted while selecting the sites?
no information, support or justification for the use of adopted methods? As It is not clear why the authors have used the reported approaches in the study? It is as if the authors have picked techniques that are available to them and went ahead with their use.
minimal insights from the results reported with no possible contribution to existing literature related to future projections.
Abstract is not written well. The authors need to explain a little bit about the methods and sites they have used in the studyand then discuss the results.
As discussion part justified the results outcome of any study and is one of the important parts of any scientific publication. The discussion part is missing in this study and the authors need to incorporate this part to justify their results.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The novelty introduced by the authors is not clear. There are many articles in a similar domain. Although the author changed some terminologies but their link with the result is very weak. A comprehensive revision is required.
-As such, there is no method is used to assess or evaluate the indices. How do authors evaluate the accuracy of the indices?
-Authors are advised to interlink sections 3.1 and 3.2.
-How do authors find the relationship between EPIs and GDP etc? What method was adopted to analyze this?
- The authors did not do any analysis related to urbanization and extreme precipitation. Thus the discussion part is little dragging.
“The variations of the linear slopes of five EPIs (except CWD) showed increased trend with the increasing site-scales, which meant that the sites which belonged to the higher site-scale suffered more extreme precipitation events”.
-What do you mean by site scale?
- Please remove section 4.2.
-Please remove section 4.3. The authors did not do any analysis related to the “ Impact of urbanization on extreme high temperature”. All indices are related to precipitation.
-Please add a limitation section.
-Please relate your research with the previously published articles.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Understanding the drivers of extreme precipitation events is critically important under climate change. Zhang et al., 2022 analyzed the relationship between human activities and extreme precipitation events. Specifically, they used population and GDP as the proxy of human activities and analyzed the relationship between human activities and six extreme precipitation indexes (EPIs). The positive relationships between the trends of five EPIs and the six levels of population density and GDP is interesting if such positive relationships are robust. After reading the paper, I have the following major comments.
Major comments
1) The word “site-scale” can make readers confused. Commonly, we refer to “site scale” as site-observation covered spatial range, instead of the number of population or GDP.
2) L19: The population and GDP can be used as the proxy of human activities but not the urban expansion here, because you only get the site-level population or GDP, which cannot reflect how the urban spatial boundary expands. Instead, why not say “show the impacts of human activities on extreme precipitation”?
3) L124-126, the population and GDP are divided into different levels, according to what kind of rules? That’s very important, because all your analyses are based on such rules. Please clarify it in your manuscript.
4) Methods section, L149-L153, why not directly calculate the correlation between population/GDP and EPIs to analyze the impacts of population/GDP on EPIs? That’s the most commonly used way to analyze the relationship between two variables instead of analyzing their correlation between slopes.
5) L154, in addition to R2, the statistical significance should also be tested and listed, e.g., the p-value
6) Fig.3-Fig.10, all the trend-related analyses should conduct significance tests with p-values. Insignificant slopes should exclude or be shown differently with significant trends.
7) Table 3 and Table 4, significance tests should be included
8) Fig.4 and Fig. 7, how were the site-scale temporal variations derived? Did you average multiple site observations within the same site scale? What’s the lower and upper bound of the box and whisker represent? Why the boxplot of VI showed no outliers and whiskers?
9) L294-L308, not the results, please move to the discussion.
10) L540-L541, this paper cannot prevent heavy rain or flood disasters.
The minor comments are listed as the followings.
Minor comments
1) L35, “sunshine” à radiative forcing
2) L40, “bring” à”brings”
3) L48-50, the main reasons for precipitation in different regions differ a lot, and multiple regions of sea surface temperature anomalies can affect the precipitation over a specific region. Bellows are related papers, which would be helpful. Please rewrite the sentences.
a) Identifying causal gateways and mediators in complex spatio-temporal systems
b) A new interhemispheric teleconnection increases predictability of winter precipitation in southwestern US
c) Wetter California Projected by CMIP6 Models With Observational Constraints Under a High GHG Emission Scenario
4) L62-63, besides sensible heat, convection, and precipitation, frequent human activities in urban areas also affect the latent heat fluxes which are closely linked to land surface energy flux partitioning, cloud and precipitation formation. The following papers showed how latent/sensible heat flux partitioning is important for land surface and atmosphere, which would be helpful.
a) Precipitation Sensitivity to Surface Heat Fluxes over North America in Reanalysis and Model Data
b) Understanding and reducing the uncertainties of land surface energy flux partitioning within CMIP6 land models
c) The Soil–Precipitation Feedback: A Process Study with a Regional Climate Model
5) L105: The total area is wrong
6) L114-115: “The weather, population and GDP data were passed through strict quality control”, any reference to show that?
7) L136: “11 EPIs was” à were
8) L147: the unit of CDD, CWD should be days/year, and R95p, Rx1day should be mm/day, PRCPTOT should be mm/year, right? Please clarify.
9) L164, “are shown”àshow
10) Fig.3, what’s the unit of population? Is it the population density or population? The unit of the slope should be /yr? what’s the meaning of /a?
11) L401, what do you mean by “higher surface sensitivity”?
12) L416-L418: this just means the extreme events increased faster instead of more extreme events.
13) L450-452, higher extreme precipitation events are not coupled with higher temperature events. Section 4.3 is not directly related to this paper
14) L454-458, whether natural variability or human activities dominate extreme precipitation events, there is no consistent conclusion, and the findings of this paper also cannot draw such conclusion.
15) L521, remove “[3]”
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Review Comments: sustainability-1919595 second revision
The authors have improved the paper in detail but still have some minor shortcomings that has to be addressed before publication as given below,
· Line 14 and 15; use of “at” multiple times in one sentence seems to impropriate, Kindly revise the sentence.
· Line 21 in abstract section: SEDL VI? It should be defined before its use. The same is the case for the rest of the abbreviations used in the abstract, you must explain them before their use. Overall, the whole abstract must be revised before publishing the article.
· The methodology is not described in brief. Authors must describe the methods in detail. What criteria they have adopted while selecting the sites?
· The authors did not respond to the following comment properly “Abstract is not written well. The authors need to explain a little bit about the methods and sites they have used in the study and then discuss the results”.
· Overall English is still poor and required improvement thoroughly as can be seen throughout the manuscript.
· Page 2,Line 83-88, the authors are explaining the extreme precipitation events on regional level, I would advise to look at their trends on international level and cite the following paper along with the more detail on extreme events,
Zaman, M.; Ahmad, I.; Usman, M.; Saifullah, M.; Anjum, M.N.; Khan, M.I.; Uzair Qamar, M. Event-Based Time Distribution Patterns, Return Levels, and Their Trends of Extreme Precipitation across Indus Basin. Water 2020, 12, 3373.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have improved their manuscript significantly. It could be accepted for publication after some minor English language edits.
Author Response
Thank you
Reviewer 3 Report
The manuscript has been improved compared with the first version, and the responses are suitable. Thanks for considering my comments. I suggest accepting the manuscript.
Author Response
Tanke you！
