Spatiotemporal Variation of the Burned Area and Its Relationship with Climatic Factors in Central Kazakhstan

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

thank you for revising the suggested issues.

I think that the manuscript is significantly improved.

Kind regards!

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for his/her encouraging comments.

Reviewer 2 Report

Spatiotemporal variation of the burned area and its relationship with climatic factors in Central Kazakhstan is a resubmission of a previously submitted paper that was a submission of significance, but had structural issues that prevented its acceptance. The authors compared satellite data products (GFED4s) to climate data focused around regions in Kazakhstan. Wildland fire/climate studies are of particular significance as weather is one of the major drivers of fire behavior and seasonal/inter-annual burn severity. This paper describes climate conditions that contribute to wildland fire behavior in a specific region. As there are few examples of these analyses by region, this alone merits publication. Additionally, these results can help inform a general understanding of how climate drives fire. 

The authors have improved the paper to my satisfaction, however, there are two minor edits that I would suggest.

Methods section 2.3.1 describes the statistical tests used in the correlation analyses. This section describes Pearson's r and the student's t in detail. It would have sufficed to say what tests were used and what software was used rather than to detail their formula and descriptions of each. It could be simplified, but is okay as is.

Figure 1 shows the capitals of the countries in Red, but the contrast makes them difficult to read and they are probably unnecessary.

Author Response

Methods section 2.3.1 describes the statistical tests used in the correlation analyses. This section describes Pearson's r and the student's t in detail. It would have sufficed to say what tests were used and what software was used rather than to detail their formula and descriptions of each. It could be simplified, but is okay as is.

Response: Thanks for the suggestions. As suggested, we simplified the methods sections 2.3.1 and deleted the formula and the descriptions of student’s t test. Please see Line 208-229. The NCAR Command Language (NCL, Version 6.5.0) was used in this study. We have added the description of this software in Line 203-204.

Figure 1 shows the capitals of the countries in Red, but the contrast makes them difficult to read and they are probably unnecessary.

Response: Thanks for suggestions, we have deleted the country capitals as suggested, which can be found in revised Figure 1.

Reviewer 3 Report

The topic of the manuscript is interesting and applicable in burned risk management. After reading the manuscript the questions and comments are as follow:

• It is not clear what is the new input and innovation among the previous work? just spatial variability with the existing global dataset? 
• Why use Pearson’s correlation, not another statistical method?
• The result obviously shows that HDF has a good correlation with burned but in some years especially 2003 had no correlation did you check what was the reasons? In Fig.7 C.Ahgust is shown clearly.
• The methodology needs to present by flowcharts it is difficult to follow the work steps.
• The conclusions do not well support the results.
• The English and grammatical errors need to check there many missed characters. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

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

Interesting and very actual topic of wildfires and their connection to climate characteristics. There is not so much on remote sensing techniques or methods, however, the study provides quite deep analysis of the relations of the burned area obtained from satellite instruments and selected climate characteristics. Actually, the results are not so surprising and the connections revealed are quite straightforward, but the detailed analysis is providing important results for the region.

However, for the prediction purposes the lagged relations should be considered, which should be at least discussed, full analysis of lags in the connection would need more temporal resolution (monthly or even more to provide probability of wildfires initiation) which is probably out of the scope of presented study. More careful consideration of different temperature characteristics would be necessary for such kind of study.

Individual comments:

l. 13 acronym explanation

l. 36-40 Are the figures for all these regions primarily of natural origin or some of them rather anthropogenic?

l. 41-43 in long term perpective this will be rather carbon neutral

l. 44-45 Meant probably locally (especially when deposited on snow), in global scale there are other more important agents

l. 149 daily maximum temperature? Why not just mean temperature. By the way, why not from the ERA 5 data as well to be consistent, perhaps even the presip data as well, although here some verification would be fine

l. 151-153 again, consistency of data, at least verification for given region, but perhaps better to use just ERA 5 for all the inputs, it would be as well consistent by resolution to GFED

l. 198-200 if I can see there is high variability in crop areas

l. 205 standard deviation is not percentage, is that normalized by monthly mean

l. 246-248 character of precipitation should be discussed (convective x stratiform), which could have effect

l. 321-322 how daily maxima considered? averaged to monthly data or absolute maximum for appropriate month taken? That is actually just random event, difficult to correlate in longer term phenomenon. Moreover, there might be lag between the temperature maximum and burned areas

l. 346-347 Figure 6

l. 350 probably confidence level?

l. 361 confidence level

l. 414-415 might be lag between the burned areas and temperature maxima

Fig. 9               colour of the line could be consistent to the Fig. 14 (black)

l. 478-482 actually, there are not exactly anomalies suppressing or bringing the water vapor transport, rather that is weaker or stronger (or changing direction) wind which modifies the overall transport to the region

l. 497-499 Is there some response of burned area for this convergence? Actually, I miss the overall burning season burned area figure as well as eventually the composit of burning area for high burning years and low burning years. his This should be somewhere at the beginning of this kind of composite discussion.

Fig. 14             correlations could be written in the figure

l. 535-541 Are there really only wild fires, no human impacts (accidental iniciation, or intensionally initiated - burning waste, how distinguished?

l. 546-552 this should be rather in the data description at the beginning of the paper

l. 553-569 for real prediction purposes - lagged dependences should be studied

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

I think you have performed a successful research in over all!

Yet, there are some minor suggestions that you can improve further your manuscript before acceptance.

the main one, is related with the explanation of the "method" which is not explicitly shown! A workflow of the method is more than appreciated!

For further details, please refer to the comments on the attached reviewed manuscript file.

I hope, you be able to revised as soon as possible and resubmit the revised version of the manuscript.

Kind regards!

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors report an analysis of how the burned area in Kazakhstan is affected by climatic variables like rainfall and temperature. The effect of these parameters on the severity of a fire season is a well established fact, and therefore the main contribution of this article is to present such an analysis for the aforementioned geographic area. It is my opinion that, while the article is well prepared and shows a good English Grammar and general formatting, the analysis is shallow, falling very frequently into tautological explanations (e.g. during the summer months the weather is warmer and drier, therefore there are more wildfires). For example, the article fails to provide a sound relationship (i.e. with a good correlation coefficient) between the burned area and the atmospheric circulation parameters. In my opinion, this is due to the fact that the authors have not calculated any indicators for fire weather, which consider all the climatic variables which the authors have analyzed separately and could perhaps provide better correlations. This is the most important point in my opinion and I invite the authors to make a further analysis considering this.

I have additional comments:

• While English is very good, there are some typos, please check. 
• Lines 117 and 124: I believe the authors are referencing the wrong figure numbers. Should be Fig. 1b instead of 1a and Fig. 1c instead of 1d, respectively. 
• Fig. 4a typo in Kazakhstan
• Line 271: the statement that less precipitation is received during the burning season contradicts what is presented in Fig. 5 and in the paragraph starting in line 244: the peak precipitation period overlaps with the first two months with higher burned area (June and July)
• Please give details on how the meteorological variables were detrended
• Were the atmospheric circulation data obtained from the ERA 5 database? Please clarify in Table 1 and in paragraph starting on line 475. 
• How would it be possible to make a difference between agricultural burns and wildfires? This is a key point, and could potentially invalidate some of the conclusions of the analysis. 
• Line 513: Rossby is the sole author in ref. 64…
• Line 563: the authors mention that precipitation is a key facto for the occurrence of wildfires, yet the whole analysis is on burned area. How do they support this statement?
• Line 566: wrong reference: Hanna K et al. does not match ref. [69]…
• Many references contain typos. e.g. [2], [28]… 

Reviewer 4 Report

Spatiotemporal variation of the burned area in Central Asia and its relationship with climatic factors review.

This study compared satellite data products (GFED4s) to climate data focused around regions in Kazakhstan. While this study does not present novel/improved methods/approaches and or algorithms of remote sensing, it does fall within the scope of Remote Sensing in that it fuses data types of multi-spectral and meteorological data for analysis. Wildland fire/climate studies are of particular significance as weather is one of the major drivers of fire behavior and seasonal/inter-annual burn severity. While the study itself is significant, it is not publishable in its present form.

There are major issues with the paper that merit withdrawal and resubmission. The narrative of the paper begins with an analysis of the entire region of Central Asia and quickly justifies the narrowing to a portion of Kazakhstan because that is where the fire is at. It would have been better to simply start from the area of interest. It would be impossible to replicate the study with the current form of the methods. There is no section that describes any of the analyses used. The first mention of any specific statistical test is in Figure 10 near the end of the paper. The results section (15 pages) contains more methods and discussion than what is contained in their respective locations. There is significant discussion in the results, but the discussion of results and the significance of those results in the discussion section doesn’t start until halfway through. The first half of the discussion reads as a better introduction than the introduction section. The authors use the result section to tell a story justifying and describing every next analysis. The result section should literally, just report results of analyses listed in the methods. The discussion and conclusion is the place to tell the story. There are enough errors and issues that prevent this from being accepted with major revisions. I recommend the authors make these changes and changes not limited to specific changes detailed below before resubmission.

Specific comments:

Lines 53-56: The citation the authors use in this sentence does not reference Canadian or Russian Climate, nor does it discuss a 2x CO2 scenario. Did they use the tool referenced to calculate such a scenario? What is the likelihood of a 2x CO2 scenario and is that twice preindustrial levels or twice current levels? Be specific.

Figure 1 should occur after the first mention of it. The paragraph that mentions figure 1 first ends on line 117.

Lines 118-127: When describing climate for the study area, cite the source of the climate data. When using the same data that was analyzed, cite that here as well.

Line 120: The figure referenced in the text is 1c, but the seasonal precipitation figure that it is referring to is 1d. Change the reference in the text or the figure.

Figure 1a is not legible. The map labels are burry and obscured. Improve the resolution and fix the topography gradient to a more appealing color scale.

Lines 139-141: This sentence should be edited for clarity. When comparing products, explicitly list the advantages. I am confused if GFED4s detects small fires more frequently or if others don’t detect them at all.

Table 1 caption should not be centered like a title and should be more descriptive.

Figure 3 is first mentioned in the paragraph ending on line 194 and should be moved.

Methods section: This section is very incomplete. The area of study and datasets are defined, but there are no descriptions of the analyses. This should be a whole subsection that details all of the analyses used from statistical tests and models to the composite analyses. The first and only mention of a statistical test by name is in Figure 10, nearly at the end of the paper. All methods, analyses, software and procedures should be clearly listed so that the study is replicable. In the current form, much of this can be inferred from the results section that should only explicitly contain results without discussion.

Lines 195-200: This whole section is more suitable as discussion, but really, if there is no fire in the rest of Central Asia. Make the study area just Northern and Central Kazakhstan for a more cohesive story.

Line 202: What kind of changes? How often should it burn? Annually or does it burn as soon as there is enough fuel to carry fire? What was the change? This should be in the discussion.

Lines 211-212: This is discussion and should be in the discussion section.

Lines 228-231: CKZ, based on the authors’ logic is an outlier and, therefore not representative of Central Asia. If they are interested in analyzing it because it is where all of the "natural" fire is, then just use it as the geographic area of interest from the beginning. Remove all trace of the other geographic areas from the paper.

Figure 4a: Kazakhstan is spelled wrong in the legend within the figure.

Figure 4b: CKZ is listed in the caption as green, but is blue in the figure.

Lines 240-243: Please just report results in this section. These lines are not necessary.

Line 247: "approximately" is this mean for the period 1997-2016?

Line 263: there should be a space between Figure and 5.

Lines 267-274: Discussion.

Figure 5: These are averages over 20 years. consider breaking these up into individual figures with SD intervals to represent the range and burned area with error bars.

Line 282: Removing the trend belongs in the methods section.

Line 283: 90% confidence interval? Throughout the paper, different confidence intervals are reported. Be consistent and pick criteria from which to reject the null and stick with it, reporting p values instead.

Lines 284-258: discussion.

Figure 6 belongs after line 290 where it is first mentioned.

Lines 291-295: describe methods, literally just report results in this section.

Lines 294-295: Is this a clearer description of the methods the authors described in line 282?

Lines 310-320: Discussion mixed with results.

Lines 327-331: Wouldn’t it be better to test this with hypothesis testing of factors like perMANOVA that will actually figure all of this out?

Lines 334-340: Does not belong here.

Line 347: Correlation coefficients? How were these calculated? Why is the first mention of them in a figure caption?

Figure 7: Are none of these significant? Correlation coefficients were listed in figure 6. Make this figure consistent with that one.

Lines 414-418: Hot should be heat. Hot is imprecise.

Figures 8,10 and supplemental: The Black dots are difficult to see in the navy blue shading. Adjust the color scale so that they are as visible in the red.

Line 429,441: The authors are referring to section 4.2.2 when they presumably mean 3.2.2?

Line 455: Composite analysis should be clearly described or cited in the methods section.

Figure 14: There is no mention of this figure in the text. What is its purpose?