Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Manuscript Ref No.: remotesensing-2266341

The manuscript has some shortcomings which need to be improved prior to its publication. My recommendation is that the article needs Major Revisions before it can be considered for publication.

 

1.      Abstract: The abstract is a bit generic. Please add some more information regarding your results. It should be improved in a quantitative way.

2.      Author should specify the key objectives of this research work in last paragraph of introduction section.

 

 

 

3.      Methodology section is weakly written. So, my suggestion is to reconstruct it. Author need to review more about adopted methods and machine learning algorithms.

4.      Discussion section should be written by comparing with already published articles in this concept. Author should write this section separately.

5.      In conclusion section, you have to mention the implications of your research and how it makes a footprint in scientific research. Try to incorporate your work to global interest how this research has worldwide importance. It will be interesting for the readers.

6.      Reference: Re-check the whole reference just to make sure you have added all the references that you cited in your manuscript.

7.      Apart from this the quality of the overall paper is very good. I prefer this article with acceptable with major modifications.

 

 

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript is fine, but I think that some changes can help to improve it:

 

 

 

1.- About the methodology, it seems that it is given that everybody knows about the subject, and it is considered that the diagram presented in Figure 2 makes everything clear. However, it would be good that they describe how they calculate the ranges, if they put formulas it helps to follow the text.

 

 

2.- About, the appropriate range and geophysical corrections are selected based on the compromise between the ANS minimum variance criterion and data availability, which will be described in section 4.1. something similar to the above, describe it in this section, instead of sending it to section 4.1. so it reads more fluently.

 

 

 

3. In the manuscript they talk about Dijkstra's algorithm, however being an algorithm that seems to be the central axis of the methodology, they only cite it. I suggest that to give more seriousness to the work they describe a little more about that algorithm so that one does not have to go to review other works.

 

 

 

over the abstract, in the sentence: The validation results against tide gauge records show that the SCMR derived SSH estimates are more accurate than any individual retracker within 0 to 10 km offshore and 20 to 100 km offshore, demonstrating the viability of the SCMR processing strategy. The sentence is fine, but I think if they elaborated a bit more it would give more punch to their work, in a simple way that sells it better.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

To increase data availability and accuracy in the coastal zone, especially in the last 5 km to the coast, this papers presents a SCMR (Seamless combination of multiple retrackers) processing strategy to combine sea surface height (SSH) estimates from waveform retrackers of SGDR MLE4, ALES, WLS3 and MB4 for Jason-3 and Saral missions, and of SAMOSA and SAMOSA+ for Sentinel-3A mission in the Australian coastal zone. The topic is important and suitable for Remote Sensing. I thus recommend acceptance of the manuscript after clarifying the following concerns.

 1. Figure 7. Precision of 20-Hz SLA estimates for all altimetry missions over coastal oceans of Australia. The subplots from (a) to (c) show the standard deviation of 20-Hz SLA estimates within 1 second for Jason-3, Saral and Sentinel-3A within 0-20 km distance band, respectively. The subplots from (d) to (f) show the same results but for the 20-100 km distance band.  The above expression is inconsistent with Figure((d) to (f) ) and needs to be modified.

 2. Line 419 As shown in the graph, should be As shown in the Figure 7 and Table 4.

 3. It is suggested to change Figures 11 to 14 to dot plot.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

Please find my comments from the attached pdf. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report

Most of my pervious concerns have been well addressed in the author's response and the revised manuscript. I have only one more question about my previous concern (1):

The mean SSH differences shown in Table 3 is not a good indicator for the performance of the bias-removing method. As noted by the authors in their reply, the intercept c_b "reflects the SSH bias (i.e., the average of SSH difference) when ?=0 (i.e., Δℎ is uncorrelated with Δ??)". Thus, the mean SSH differences, after removing ∆h from Eq 2, would be largely reduced if (a) the bias-removing method works well or (b) the SSH difference (Δℎ) is uncorrelated to the significant wave height difference (Δ??), which indicates that the bias-removing method does not work and c_b equals to the mean SSH bias. Instead, the mean SSH differences after removing ∆h from Eq 2 may reach a maximum value when a weak linear relation exists between Δℎ and Δ??. I recommend the authors use root-mean-square error of SSH in Table 3.

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx