Water Recharge of Jinan Karst Springs, Shandong, China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript "Water Recharge of Jinan Karst Springs, Shandong, China" is well written and of interest for the readers of Water. Although the references used could be more up to date and refer to more recent methods and issues related to karst hydrology, I believe that this work is of interest for the local region of Jinan Karst Springs and merits publication. Although the paper has been already proofread (according to the acknowledgement section), I believe that it could be further improved if sent to a native speaker expert in this scientific field. I warmly recommend to include some discussion about the uncertainty affecting the outcomes of this study. Additional comments, as well as suggestions for references are added in the attached pdf file
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 1 Comments
Dear editor/reviewer:
We thank the two reviewers and editor for their insightful and encouraging comments. We appreciate their efforts in helping to improve our paper. We have finished the correction according to the reviewers’ suggestions. Reviewers’ comments are in black font, our responses and any changes are in red font. All the corrections are clearly highlighted in red font in the manuscript as well. All the comments from the reviewers have been replied point by point. If you have any queries, please contact us.
Thank you and best regards.
Corresponding author: Liting Xing
E-mail: [email protected]
Reviewer :
Point 1: Here the authors may want to refer also to the relevance of land use.
Response 1: According to your suggestion, We have added content. “Aiming at the impact of the dynamic changes of the surface environment, Daniel Bittner [19] and Chloé Ollivier [20] proposed a new semi-distributed model to discuss the impact of heterogeneity at different degrees on aquifer flow and proved this method has wide adoptability, but it did not refer to the recharge ratio of different karst aquifers.”(LINE 59-62)
Point 2: Here the authors may want to refer to more recent litarature.
Response 2: According to your suggestion, We add two recent litaratures. “For example, conducted the short-term scale (i.e. hourly and daily scale) of trace experiments and introduced transfer function approach to describe the transport of fluorescent dye solutes [23], through long-term monitoring of the chemical characteristics of spring water, revealed the origin of spring water and showed inversely how the law of karst water system changes [24], ”(LINE 79-82)
Point 3: The authors may want to better justify this methodological choice. In fact non stationary mehtods for the analysis could be also quite relevant
Response 3: According to your suggestion, We have added content. “Regarding to the research of spring water recharge, there are two methods which are capable of being adopted into frequency analysis. One is to establish the conceptual reservoir model and use Fourier spectra analysis to study the relationship between the spectral changes of natural tracers and different discharges within the model [34]. This method requires high requirements for hydrogeological conditions and data in the study area, so, compared with the above methods, we choose the simple method-the CFD.”(LINE 176-181)
Point 4: General comment: I personally find the titles of the subsections too long and detailed
Response 4: .According to your suggestion, We have modified the subsections title.
“4.3.4.2. The recharge source of the Baotu spring and Heihu spring(LINE 425)
4.3.4.3. The recharge source of the Zhenzhu spring and Heihu spring”(LINE 442)
Point 5: Why hidden?
Response 5: We have change"Hidden" to "Included"(LINE 232)
Point 6: typo
Response 6: We have change “P1” to “P1”(LINE 234)
Point 7: I think the authors should also focus on the description of the limitations of this study in terms of uncertainty in their outcome. I do not request to explicitly include a rigorous uncertainty analysis, however, the interpretation of the data could be bettere supported by a quantitative model, to reduce epistemic uncertainty relataed to the conceptual model. Uncertainty quantification is palying a big issue in the karst community at the moment and also descriptive studies should take it into consideration in the discussion of their results.
Response 7: According to your suggestion, We added uncertainty analysis in section 4.3.5 .
“4.3.5. Uncertainty analysis
Uncertainty is a significant issue in the study of karst water systems. At present, scholars has implemented sensitivity analysis of model parameters and quantify uncertainty [35]. The key is to figure out the hydrological processes in the study area [36], in order to determine the rationality of various parameters in the model. According to our research, the uncertainty of the calculation results of the mixing ratios of the four spring groups is mainly reflected in the large differences in mixing ratios in different years, for instance the proportions of the Baotu Spring recharged by the Ordovician Sanshanzi Formation fracture-karst water in 2017 was 1.49 times as large as that in 2018. However, this uncertainty does not affect the consistency of the calculation results with the hydrogeological conditions in the study area. This is to say that the Baotu spring discharge in 2017 was 1.86 times as large as the 2015 discharge, that is, the Ordovician limestone aquifer recharge ratio increased in the year when the spring discharge was large. Furthermore, it shows that Ordovician limestone aquifer is the main source of karst water system supply. Baotu Spring and Heihu Spring with large spring flow mainly are recharged by Ordovician karst water. The temperature curve decomposition also shows that Baotu Spring and Heihu Spring are mainly shallow cycles. Therefore, the CFD analysis of the source of spring water recharge is in line with the actual conditions of the karst water system in Jinan.”(LINE 465-481)
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Specific Notes
Figure 1: Spelling error “rive recharge area” should be river recharge area Figure 2: Only show the tracer drop point at Cuima village and not the other sites. Figure 9: Need some uniform scale on the axes, makes comparison difficult. Figure 11: misspelling of “lever” instead of “level” Line 292: misspelling of “bur” instead of “but”General Notes:
Sections 1 and 2 have many serious language/grammar issues that make these sections difficult to read. Section 4.2.2 says it is meant to talk about conductivity duration curves yet the information presented in the figures/text is about the temperature curves. In Figure 3, "Karst water" is repeated 3 times as an entry without reference to the body it belongs to. Need tables to summarize section 4 to establish connectivity between the formations and the springs mentioned No equations to support the conclusions made in section 4.3.4. The interpretation of data here is rushed and therefore the usefulness of the techniques for other researchers is not well laid-out.Author Response
Dear editor/reviewer:
We thank the two reviewers and editor for their insightful and encouraging comments. We appreciate their efforts in helping to improve our paper. We have finished the correction according to the reviewers’ suggestions. Reviewers’ comments are in black font; our responses and any changes are in red font. All the corrections are clearly highlighted in red font in the manuscript as well. All the comments from the reviewers have been replied point by point. Please review the attachment. If you have any queries, please contact us.
Thank you and best regards.
Corresponding author: Liting Xing
E-mail: [email protected]
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Much improved
