A Comparative Assessment of Hydrological Models in the Upper Cauvery Catchment

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

see in the attachment

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript submitted for review presents the comparison of the predictive capability of three hydrological models in a heavily influenced catchment in Peninsula India. Authors highlight the performance evaluation of a multi-model ensemble consisting of GWAVA (Global Water AVailability Assessment) model, SWAT (Soil Water Assessment Tool) and VIC (Variable Infiltration Capacity) model for comparative purposes and the key catchment hydrological processes.

I believe that the article is written well and clearly. The authors used three popular hydrological programs and compared them in the Upper Cauvery catchment area of India.

In Chapter 1, Introduction, authors present a review of the literature on hydrological modeling, used models and research area - the Cauvery Catchment. 34 of 72 references are cited here. Reviewer has no comments, except that the selection of literature is at times random. But it does the job.

In Chapter 2, the authors present the Model Descriptions - multi-model. This chapter contains a description of the Variable Infiltration Capacity Model (VIC), Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and Global Water Availability Assessment Model (GWAVA). Their advantages and disadvantages as well as requirements and methods of calibration are presented. 18 of 72 references are cited here. The authors have placed the most important elements of the description in this chapter. The reviewer has no comments.

In Chapter 3, the authors present the materials and methods, it means site description, input data and model application (respectively for VIC, SWAT and GWAVA) and model performance criteria. The reviewer has no comments for this part. Comments are on the vocabulary – instead of streamflow maybe it's better to use the flow rate? (e.g. line 317-318, 446-447).

In Chapter 4, the authors present the results. The reviewer has comments of a general nature. Why so few results? Why only one hydrograph. The presentation of the results against the background of the pentagon is difficult to understand.

Chapter 5 presents a detailed discussion of the conducted research with reference to literature. The reviewer has no comments on this chapter. Standardize references to literature.

In chapter 6, the authors present main conclusions. Succinctly and properly. The reviewer has no comments.

There is something at the end of the manuscript that the reviewer does not understand - 7. Patents. Is this a new chapter? This chapter / sentence (?) is followed by the authors' declarations.

References – 72 items, correctly selected.

In summary, the manuscript is written on a fairly general level. This applies to the methods of describing the tools used and the presentation of results. However, I think that the convention adopted by the authors is correct - the tools are commonly known. They were applied to one region - it is a case study (change of title to consider).

Author Response

Please see attached

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper A comparative assessment of the GWAVA, SWAT and VIC models in the hydrological modelling of upper Cauvery Cathcment, India  brings important conclusion on using this king of models in hydrological research. Before publishing the authors must improve some aspects related to thei work

1. first of all the title is to long. This kind of title is not suitable to use from a scientific work. The authors must make an synthetic title of their work
2. the abstract must be improved to show the objectives and the results obtained
3. also the period used to analyze this models from 1983 to 2005 are quite not in the present time. Why authors use this period?
4. in introduction part the rows from 63 to 77 must be moved to the study area part or in the site description part
5. at the end of the introduction the authors must clearly present the objectives of the research
6. The model description part must be included in the materials and method part in a synthetic way
7. all three formulas from the models performance criteria must have a reference if the formula are described in others papers
8. the text from row 341 to 345 must be included at the end of the materials and method chapter
9. the figure used (figure 3 to figure 7)for individual model performance are difficult to understand. Maybe another type of diagrams are suitable to use for describing this performance
10. In the discussion part the authors must compare their results with others results obtained in the field. in this paper just in rows 564 to 566 the authros connect theri work with other results... In agreement with literature [14][16][17][26][13], the ensemble predictions outperformed the individual models across all five catchments. When the ensemble model performance is compared to that of Pateland Ramachandran (2015) using ANN and SVR models it would seem that ensemble....
11. According to this observation the paper needs important improvements (major revision) before publishing

Author Response

Please see attached

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

see the file

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors took into account all the comments of the reviewer. Minor editorial shortcomings should be removed before publication

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors improved their manuscript and the paper can be published in this form.