Terrestrial Water Storage Change Retrieved by GRACE and Its Implication in the Tibetan Plateau: Estimating Areal Precipitation in Ungauged Region
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript needs minor improvement. In Figure 3, vertical scales in graphs (a), (b), (c) and (d) should be uniform (-40, 360). The same concerns Figure 4 - vertical scales in graphs (a), (b), (c) and (d) should be uniform (-100, 300). The improved version of the manuscript can be recommended for publication.
Author Response
Dear Editor:
I am very grateful for your considerations and invaluable comments. We have reviewed relevant literatures, replenished relative works and revised the manuscript.
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This manuscript presents rainfall estimates using GRACE data over the Tibetan Plateau. To do so, the water balance equation was used. I still do not see the interest to get a basin-scale precipitation rate. I think this should be clearly justified, especially as many rainfall satellite products exist. In the introduction, the authors mentionned that they will use the water balance equation at basin-scale. I have two remarks about this. First, you should clearly state that the Tibetan Plateau is a hydrological basin. If not, this relationship cannot be used. Second, you could mention that this relationship was used either to derive runoff (e.g., Syed et al., 2009) or evapatranspiration rate (e.g., Ramillien et al., 2006).
Ramillien, G., Frappart, F., Güntner, A., Ngo‐Duc, T., Cazenave, A., & Laval, K. (2006). Time variations of the regional evapotranspiration rate from Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite gravimetry. Water resources research, 42(10).
Syed, T. H., Famiglietti, J. S., & Chambers, D. P. (2009). GRACE-based estimates of terrestrial freshwater discharge from basin to continental scales. Journal of Hydrometeorology, 10(1), 22-40.
Author Response
Dear Editor:
I am very grateful for your considerations and invaluable comments. We have reviewed relevant literatures, replenished relative works and revised the manuscript.
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
In an abstract, write that “CGDPA (the China Gauge-based Daily Precipitation Analysis) has an underestimate in some basins, especially up to ~ 430 mm/y in YZ. The possible cause was speculated as the sparse stations and their uneven distribution. It indicates a potential method for estimating basin-scale precipitation through integrating basin average precipitation from the water balance equation in the poorly gauged and ungauged regions ”is not entirely correct, since this is not the main purpose of the manuscript based on the title.
The cut “mm/y” is not very successful. Usually they write “mm/yr”
Place paragraphs 55-82 at the beginning before 36-54
Appendix A should be removed. All the necessary information is in the references
Abbreviations UYE (upper Yellow River), UYA (upper Yangtze River), YZ (Yarlung Zangbo River) and QT (Qiangtang Plateau) make the text difficult to understand
Author Response
Dear Editor:
I am very grateful for your considerations and invaluable comments. We have reviewed relevant literatures, replenished relative works and revised the manuscript.
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
My concerns were taken into account. Thanks.
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Authors addressed ll my concerns. I do not have additional comments.
Author Response
Dear Editor:
Thanks very much for your approval!
Yours Sincerely,
Hanbo YANG, Ph.D.
Department of Hydraulic Engineering
Tsinghua University
Beijing 100084, China
Tel: +86-10-62796324
Fax: +86-10-62796971
E-mail: [email protected]
Reviewer 2 Report
Your manuscript compared to the previous version. Nevertheless, two main issues remains that fatally flaws your manuscript :
What is the interest to estimate basin-scale rainfall ? Either you have good estimates of rainfall from a good in situ network and this is meaningless or you do not have any meausrement and it is reasonable to think that you do not have good estimates of ET and runoff, and so your results are of poor quality. Rainfall cannot be negative and it is the case in your estimates. This is not physically feasible !In my opinion , your introduction is poorly written for the GRACE data. You should mention that GRACE is used for measuring TWS (Tapley et al., 2004 + recent reviews) and has been widely used to monitor several components of TWS as soil moisture (e.g., Swenson et al., 2008), groundwater (e.g., Famiglietti, 2014 ; Frappart and Ramillien, 2018) or snow (e.g., Frappart et al., 2011). Then, that applying the water balance equation, it is possible, basin-scale to isolate the runoff and the evapotranspiration (cite the papers who worked globally if possible as Syed et al. Or Ramillien et al.). Then pursue as you did on the Tibetan Plateau).
References :
Famiglietti, J. S. (2014). The global groundwater crisis. Nature Climate Change, 4(11), 945.
Frappart, F., Ramillien, G., & Famiglietti, J. S. (2011). Water balance of the Arctic drainage system using GRACE gravimetry products. International journal of remote sensing, 32(2), 431-453.
Frappart, F., & Ramillien, G. (2018). Monitoring groundwater storage changes using the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission: A review. Remote Sensing, 10(6), 829.
Swenson, S., Famiglietti, J., Basara, J., & Wahr, J. (2008). Estimating profile soil moisture and groundwater variations using GRACE and Oklahoma Mesonet soil moisture data. Water Resources Research, 44(1).
Author Response
Dear Editor:
Here I would like to make a considerate response and discussion to your kind suggestion.
First of all, I am very grateful for your considerations and valuable comments. We have reviewed relevant literature, replenished relative works and revised the manuscript. Our responses are provided in the following attachment. In the following, the blue text is from the reviewers’ comments, the dark text is our response to the concerns, and the red text is the revision in the manuscript. Besides, the relative edited words/sentences have already been highlighted in red in the resubmitted manuscript file, while minor mistakes in grammar and some sentences have been already modified in the manuscript.
Thank you very much for your kind arrangement for review and considerations about our manuscript.
Yours Sincerely,
Hanbo YANG, Ph.D.
Department of Hydraulic Engineering
Tsinghua University
Beijing 100084, China
Tel: +86-10-62796324
Fax: +86-10-62796971
E-mail: [email protected]
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Corrected manuscript acceptable for publication
Author Response
Dear Editor:
Thanks very much for your approval! We would further edit the English language and writing style of this manuscript.
Yours Sincerely,
Hanbo YANG, Ph.D.
Department of Hydraulic Engineering
Tsinghua University
Beijing 100084, China
Tel: +86-10-62796324
Fax: +86-10-62796971
E-mail: [email protected]
Reviewer 4 Report
The paper has been improved, particularly the first part related to trends in TWS.
However, I am not completely satisfied from the replies of the authors for the precipitation estimation part. As mentioned in my previous review, I believe the following comments should be addressed more carefully:
1) Why not showing trend in the different component of the water balance, i.e., R and ET? It will provide information on which component is increasing\decreasing and thus will help the understanding of the physical processes that have occurred.
2) As shown in the new Fig. 4, the contribution of TWS is much lower than that of ET and R in the estimation of monthly precipitation. Therefore, the estimated precipitation, and its uncertainty, is mostly related to ET and R, and their uncertainty. It should be clarified and discussed.
3) I would like to see the performance in terms of anomaly time series, i.e., by removing the (strong) seasonal cycle.
4) Why negative precipitation? Only a short explanation is given but more analyses are needed, at least to me.
On this basis, I believe a moderate revision is still needed before the acceptance of the paper.
Author Response
Dear Editor:
Here I would like to make a considerate response and discussion to your kind suggestion.
First of all, I am very grateful for your considerations and valuable comments. We have reviewed relevant literature, replenished relative works and revised the manuscript. Our responses are provided in the following attachment. In the following, the blue text is from the reviewers’ comments, the dark text is our response to the concerns, and the red text is the revision in the manuscript. Besides, the relative edited words/sentences have already been highlighted in red in the resubmitted manuscript file, while minor mistakes in grammar and some sentences have been already modified in the manuscript.
Thank you very much for your kind arrangement for review and considerations about our manuscript.
Yours Sincerely,
Hanbo YANG, Ph.D.
Department of Hydraulic Engineering
Tsinghua University
Beijing 100084, China
Tel: +86-10-62796324
Fax: +86-10-62796971
E-mail: [email protected]
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
There ia major issue. It is not physically possible to have negative rainfall. In Figure 3, for all the basins, the rainfall exhibit negative minima with values between 25 and 30% of the maximum. This fatally flas your manuscript.
Reviewer 4 Report
Authors addressed my latest comments and I believe the paper can be accepted as is. Congratulations to the authors.
