Evaluation and Comparison of Six High-Resolution Daily Precipitation Products in Mainland China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

• As highlighted in the introduction and discussion, could the authors expound how these evaluation of daily precipitation products would help the agricultural research in relation to this study?
• Line 346: Do humid and dry regions refer to regions with low elevations (or east region) and high elevations (or west region), respectively?
• Line 347-348: Do the authors think that these gridded observations have less skill in capturing precipitation variability in high elevation area? Or the low CC in these regions are influenced by the low density of rain gauges and the variability of precipitation in these regions are not well represented?
• Include the MAE equation in Table 1. Why did the authors use MAE in this section instead of RRMSE?
• Line 374-375: R1, R2, R8 have high RRMSE in Section 3..2.1 but these regions have the lowest MAE in Sec 3.2.2. what does this imply?
• Section 3.2.3: Non-rainy/Rainy months and season can be clearly seen if monthly means (annual cycle) will be plotted instead of the daily time series.
• Section 3.2.4: Are dry regions constantly have low rainfall throughout the year? The author’s statement on humid (I assume is the region with high rainfall) and dry regions is a little misleading. As reflected in Fig. 8, R1,3,4,5,6,8 has dry and wet months. To make it more consistent, the authors should try to regroup which regions (Ri) are in the north, east, south, and central China and remove the words, humid and dry regions.
• The results of the statistics are quite confusing. Best and worst gridded products differ from one section of the paper to another, and from different regions. The authors should try to summarize all these statistics (from sections 3.2.1 to 3.2.4) in a table to make it easy to understand.

 

Minor:

Line 121: What does ‘unstable monsoon’ mean?

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The work correctly describes the procedure performed, the results obtained are consistent with the methodology used. The adaptations of the databases used are correctly described. The analysis of the literature is pertinent and describes very well the current state of knowledge. The presentation of graphs, maps and tables is adequate. The results validation process is adequate and the discussion is consistent with them. Based on the discussion of the results, the conclusions are correct and confirm the initial assumptions raised in the research. There are no suggestions.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

The authors have evaluated and compared six high-quality daily precipitation products against 2,413 rain gauge stations at a daily scale in nine regions over mainland China. The subject of the study is interesting, and the article is well written and structured. My main concern is the length of the temporal coverage used (5 years). The short time period may influence the selection of the best precipitation product. Why only the 2015-2019 period was selected? Many papers in the literature have evaluated the performance of high-resolution precipitation datasets with at least 30 years. Moreover, for a properly standards of the journal Remote Sensing others analyses must be included, such as: trends analysis, ENSO influence. I am sorry but I cannot recommend publication.

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

None of my previous suggestion have been implemented. Although I understand the hard work done (more than 4 million samples were evaluated), I still believe that other analyses should be included in the manuscript.

Author Response

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