Evaluation and Analysis of the Effectiveness of the Main Mitigation Measures against Surface Urban Heat Islands in Different Local Climate Zones through Remote Sensing

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The subject matter of the reviewed article is very important and up-to-date. The author/authors (unfortunately, information about the authors and their affiliations were not provided) justified the topic in detail, presenting an interesting literature review.

However, I have reservations about the description of the results, in particular the Discussions and Conclusions.

The area of analysis has been presented very generally. The illustrations presented in the results are small and the open or industrial areas indicated in the results cannot be distinguished.

Discussion duplicates data from results. There is no answer to the most important question - which measures commonly used heat mitigation methods may be more suitable for implementation in future urban developments. There is no answer to this question in Conclusion either.

The author/authors declare that the results of their research can be applied in other cities. Unfortunately, there is no clear summary of the research results and no developed methodology on how to study other cities and how to analyze the results of these studies to know what methods of heat mitigation should be planned in future urban development.

Author Response

Please consult the attached report where the answer is given point by point.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The topic of the manuscript is highly correlated with the target section. However, the following concerns need to be answered.

1) Line 60. Please check if 'they' here is proper.

2) Line 100. Please check if the first '.' is proper.

3) Line 149. What does 'PV' mean?

4) Line 152. How does the SVM method be implemented? How to get training data? How about the accuracy?

5) Line 172. I cannot find the reference by Steward and Oke, 2012.

6) Line 185-186. What is SCP? More explainations are suggested.

7) The maps of local climate zones in different years are suggested to be shown in the results.

8) Lines 286-287. What do 'ZCL' and 'LZC' mean? They occured for multiple times.

9) Line 307. What's the purpose for using Kruskal Wallis test? What's the meaning of the results?

10) Line 370. What does 'Difference of square' mean in Table 2?

11) Lines 429-432. How did the authors get the equation 10? More descriptions are suggested.

12) The improvements of the manuscript compared to other existing studies should be discussed.

Need improvements for multiple sentences.

Author Response

Please consult the attached report where the answer is given point by point.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Evaluation and analysis of the effectiveness of the main mitigation strategies of the Surface Urban Heat Island in the different Local Climate Zones through remote sensing

This paper claims to analyze the effectiveness of the main mitigation strategies of the Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI) between the years 2002 and 2022 in different Local Climate Zones of the city of Granada (Spain).   What is really does is correlate (NDVI) normalized difference vegetation index, (PV) vegetal proportion, normalized difference building index and albedo.  More correctly they suggest that they are comparing the increase in vegetation, the increase of albedo and combinations of both with LST to determine which sets of variables are associated with the lowest change in LST values.

is an interesting paper, but needs a lot of work before publication.  In its current state, it cannot be published.

First, there are English language problems throughout the text that make it difficult to understand what the author intents.   For example, the first sentence in the abstract is almost incomprehensible as the author attempts to combine land use change, population growth, global warming (by the way global warming is not due to extreme climatic phenomena), increasing temperatures, quality of life and social vulnerability into one thought.  The sentence is not very successful.  I suggest cutting the sentence into pieces with different thoughts in each sentence.  The author might consider that for much of the paper. 

Second, the authors seem to make very general statements that may not be true.  For example, the title suggests that this is an evaluation of mitigation strategies, but it isn’t really. It is a study of the difference in the impact of albedo and NDVI on surface temperature.  There is no evidence presented that changes identified were the work of “mitigation strategies.”  Another example is that the United Nations provides projections, not predictions.  They have a series of different projections based upon different assumptions.  The author should read Mora et al (2018) more carefully.  He estimated land area affected, not population.  Population values were estimated based upon national populations.  For an analysis of population affected by heat waves see Marcotullio et al (2021) Frontiers: Built Environment.  The list of mis-statements goes on. 

Methodologically, I’m concerned about the number of images examined.  The author states they examined only images in July of each year for 2002, 2012 and 2022.  How many were there?  If this is Landsat, we’re talking about 2, at most, per month?  If so, that isn’t enough to provide a rigorous analysis. 

Finally, these types of UHI and LST analysis have been done for many cities.  The author has not made a good argument as to this research’s contribution to the literature.    

Needs improvement.  

Author Response

Please consult the attached report where the answer is given point by point.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Authors have responded to my questions.

The authors have attempted to clean up some of the English language issues.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf