Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper has been extensively reworked, and I think that the overall readability as well as the presentation and discussion of the results has improved quite a bit. 
The new figures allow a much easier visual inspection and the reasons for your choices on used equations and study-sites are now much clearer.

While the data-scarcity is still the primary concern for this study,
I aggree that this is something that can be improved in subsequent studies.

Alltogether I think the paper is now ready for publication.
(just some very minor comments below)

Comments:

84 : "This suggests that band X could be used... ... as it has been done for band C"
        I would suggest using the terms "X-band" and "C-band"

212 : "The second "constraint is the utilized dataset has to be polarimetric"

The second constraint is, that the utilized dataset has to be polarimetric

215 : "Actually, as explained in ..., this requirement "

I guess you missed putting in the reference ?

217 : "As a consequence, we had to scale back to a simplified β computation; however, the decision..."

I'd suggest referring to the equation as well... e.g. something like:
"... we had scale back to the simplified β computation (4); however..."

332 "...whose correlation averages around 0.76 on the surviving test sites."

...on the remaining test-sites...

 

Author Response

please see attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors are referred to the attached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

please see attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for your answers and clarifications, the manuscript has improved considerably.

I still wonder about the SAR preprocessing, which was performed in QGIS. Are these self-developed or publicly available plugins? It would be relevant to mention the names and possibly references.