Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

• Author(s) should add, scale and N direction at Figs. 2, 3 and 6.
• Fig. 7 , part (a), significant level and data numbers should be added. 
• At conclusions, future work would be added.

Author Response

We thank this reviewer for his/her time invested to improve this manuscript.

The English grammar and syntaxis were reviewed in the document.

Responses to requests:

1. The directions (N) and the scales were added to Figures 2, 3, and 6.

2. Figures 5 and 7 were added with the p values and n as the number of data.

3. The conclusions were improved by adding future recommendations for research: 

" For future research, these authors recommend the combination of more indexes, like SPEI (Standardised Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index) and NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index). These indexes consider not only temperature and precipitation but also the stage of live green vegetation, which allows a better estimation of the drought phenomena."

4. A new revision of the English language (grammar and syntaxis) was performed to the document.

 

 

Reviewer 2 Report

Major comments:

Lines 79 and 294: Is the increase in SPI values related to the severity of drought? As you mentioned later in Tables 1 and 2, largely negative SPI values are related to much sever drought. The phrase "increase of SPI values" is not suitable in Line 79. In Line 294, when SPI increases (wetter case), a reduction in corn crop and livestock occurs ... is it true?

 

Lines 146-159: Please explain Equation 1 and related variables in more details. 

• What's the subscript "i"? Does "i" mean each month between 1 and 7 (or 3 and 9) from March to September?
• Is "m" is equal to 7 (March to September) in this study?
• What's the drought level NSi? The 1st column of Table 2, labeled as Drought level, includes some texts, not any numeric values. If these texts are drought level, we can not compute Equation 1. Where do you show the drought level values?
• I think Pi shows the assigned values, shown in the 3rd column of Table 2.  Why you convert the SPI values to these positive integer values? The drought severity is linearly increased due to the SPI value decrease from 0 to largely negative value? The assigned values affect to PP_ANU largely. Please explain why you assign these values in more details.
• Please explain why you use the abbreviation "PP_ANU" as the SPI weighted average. Unfortunately, the word "PP_ANU" is not used in any paragraphs, figures, and tables. You may be able to name the value in more useful form.

Lines 175-180: Please explain Equation 2.

• What's the merit of the change rate defined as Equation 2, instead of (A_AC - A_AN) / A_An? Usually, the change rate is computed as the difference divided with the previous year value.
• Why the subscriptions "Ac" and "An" indicate the current and previous years, respectively? I think "c" and "p" are enough to show the current and previous years, respectively.
• Unfortunately, the abbreviation "TC" is less used in the following texts, figures, and tables, and I can not find why the change rate is written as "TC".
• Which you use TC of drought level, raw SPI or SPI weighted average? You write just "SPI" in Lines 177 and 187, etc. If the former one, positive and negative values of TC may be complex to compare TC of the other variables.
• You can show some examples of TC values to reduce such comparison difficulty.

 

Minor comments:

Lines 32-34: IPCC does not define the drought as you write for the first time in [2]. It looks a drought definition generally used before [2]. There are many kinds of drought definitions due to the research fields. Please take care of usage of "definition of drought".

 

Line 68: What's "FDP"? I doubt it may be "PDF" as probability density function.

 

Lines 87-88: What's "L.N." and "L.O."? "W" and "N" are enough here?

 

Table 1: What's "y" and "a" in the 1st column of Table 1?

 

Lines 107 and 123: There are two subsubsections numbered as "2.3.1".

 

Line 110: Add "in Mexico" between "... weather stations" and "and have ..." to limit the National Meteorological Service in Mexico.

 

Lines 134-137: Please explain these 2 kinds of livestock variables in details. Livestock means all of animals for meat, or only cattle? What's the difference between the volume of production (units in tons) and the weight of meat (units in kilograms). The difference is the weight of non-food part such as born and hide? If so, the difference is related to the drought? In addition, I think "tons" is the unit of weight, except for the case that its density is 1kg/L or 1g/cm3, such as liquid water.

 

Lines 203 and so on: Instead of "masl", you should use "above msl" or "amsl" as "above mean sea level".

 

Figure 2 and related texts: Larger value is related to severer drought or many drought years in each decade. However, I can not imagine what a sever dry decade occur there, because the SPI weighted average (or PP_ANU?) is not directly connected with the drought level shown in Tables 1 and 2. The misunderstanding of mine may be related to the unknown NSi in Equation 1.

 

Table 3: As the label of the 1st column should be written as "PP_ANU range" or "SPI weighted average range" instead of "SPI range", if not the raw SPI range.

 

Figure 3 and related texts: Please explain the maximum temperature behavior per decade. Is it based on 7-month (March to September) averaged temperature, or the highest monthly averaged temperature among the 7 months, or the highest daily averaged temperature among the 214 days (7 months) in a given year? In addition, the temperature values are averaged over the decade, or the highest value in the decade are selected? I can not understand the definition even I read sections 2.3 and 3.2. 

 

Line 234: "around three°C" should be revised as "around 3°C"

 

Section 3.3: You analyzed the typical El Nino (2005 and 2015) and La Nina (2011) events only. If possible, the number of samples should be increased in both cases, even if the limited analysis.

 

Line 244: Where is Section 2.3.2?

 

Figure 4 and related texts: You described the figure illustrates "the behavior of the change rate of variables", but it looks the number of municipalities which are selected with the change rate in Equation 2. I can not understand what's the thresholds to select such municipalities. For the vertical axis, you can add the total number of municipalities in your study here, or you can show the percentage rate instead of the number of municipalities. In addition, you can add "El Nino" and "La Nina" near 2004/2015 and 2011, instead of "El Nino/La Nina events" in the horizontal axis, respectively.

 

Figures 5 and 7 and related texts: most of the panels show the quite low R2 values. Are these relationships significant? The contributions of SPI and Temp max may not be so large due to the too small R2.

If so, why the yield, volume, weight and maximum temperature have negative value in Figures 5 and 7? If they are the anomaly values, you have to explain them and add a unit for each axis. Does "SPI value" mean the raw SPI in the horizontal axis in Figure 5?

 

Line 382: "El Nino (2005 y 2015) y La Nina (2011)" should be revised as "El Nino (2005 and 2015) and La Nina (2011)".

 

 

Figures 2, 3, and 6: There are no annotations in horizontal and vertical axes, such as longitudes and latitudes.

Figure 3: Each panel has no subtitle from a) to d), although such letters are written in the caption. In addition, how about such letters in Figure 2 panels?

 

Author Response

We thanks this reviewer for his great reccomendations.

We have checked our English grammar and syntaxis in the document again.

The responses for this reviewer are attached in the file.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx