Measuring Sand Dune Dynamics in the Badain Jaran Desert, China, Using Multitemporal Landsat Imagery

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

There are many places surrounded by desert while many infrastructures build in desert. Therefore, to understand sand dune dynamics in space and time being very urgent in certain places. This paper selecting a very good topic and methods for exploring the dynamics of sand dune in the study area which is a famous desert in China. However, this paper did not meet a basic requirement of a research paper to publish not only this journal but also in any other journal due to poorly organized logical structure and poor English grammar as well.

The abstract and introduction should be rewritten, and entire paper structure need to be re-organized logically. Methods also need to be re-checked with more proper citation to avoid plagiarism.

 Some specific comments: 

1.      Please re-think about the term of “estimate” in the title. Is it “measurement” or “estimate？

2.      Spatial positioning is the key factor for measuring the spatial dynamics. But it is not explained how this paper solved this problem how accurate it.

3.       

4.      Line 33: the edge of outline, brink lines need to be checked by technical terms.

5.      Line 41-43: Description of study area no need to be appeared in the introduction. First appeared place name should be in full spelling.

6.      Line 46: “four typical areas” where?

7.      Line 47-48: “Yang et al. reported the sand transport from BJD to Tengger desert[17] and Ulan Buh desert [18] through the corridors.” Why this described here? What are its relations?

8.      Line 64-79: the study area described in conflict way. “the height of BKD is between 1000-2000 meters above sea level”. May be using “elevation” is more proper here. But it is unacceptable to followed by “…which is about 480 m above sea level”. It is completely. Author confused the elevation of a point and height of a point.

9.      Line 89-97: which data used in this study need to be clearly described in a proper way.

10.    Line 110: “better than others” should be give a real data/value to explain how accurate it is.

11.    Line 116: describe the “co-registering accuracy”. co-register is about spatial position. it is necessary to clarify the spatial positioning accuracy or precision of the positioning.

12.    Equation (6)： “3650” is this a symbol or a data?  Number of days for 10 years should more than 3650. We have 366 days once in four years.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Reviewer's Comments

 Title: Estimate the Sand Dunes dynamics in Badain Jaran Desert using Multi-temporal Landsat Imageries

 

  Manuscript ID: remotesensing-2004319

General Remarks

Generally, the article remotesensing-2004319 entitled " Estimate the Sand Dunes dynamics in Badain Jaran Desert using Multi-temporal Landsat Imageries" demonstrates one of the widely used technique (analysis of remotely sensed data) to study the Sand Dunes dynamics. The manuscript is clearly written, with some Minor comments.

1-      There  are numerous language issues (sentence structure, grammatical errors, and typos) in this manuscript. The entire document has to have its language edited carefully.

2-      In the title of manuscript insert the country of studied area.

3-      The work needs to add geologic setting of the study area.

4-      Why you don’t used  Landsat 2010 image as one of more accuracy of results?

5-      In page 1 line 40 change word alos by also

6-      In page 3 line 115 add the publication year of  Manuel et al (????)

7-      This work also needs to field works observations to confirmed the results (If you can)

8-      The paper based on Multi-temporal Landsat Imageries, In such works, it is preferable to use data with high spatial resolution, Landsat 5 data have low spatial resolution, Why did you choose this particular data?.

 

 

 

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf