Utilizing Optical Satellite Imagery to Monitor Temporal and Spatial Changes of Crop Water Stress: A Case Study in Alfalfa

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I suggest some minor revision

l. 71. Give the area of each zone
l.126. a some documentation of the Pearson selection
l. 133 You should define the  TAI

Author Response

Dear reviewer. We thank you for your comments and we changed the text accordingly. Please see below how we address each of your comments:

l. 71. Give the area of each zone – We wrote it in lines 71-72.
l.126. a some documentation of the Pearson selection - Added a reference (line 136)
l. 133 You should define the TAI - It was defined in Line 94, and we further explain it again in this paragraph.

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors intended to predict CWS through monitoring the crop growth. However, there are some serious issues that need to be addressed before considering this work for publication.

1. The manuscript needs extensive English editing.
2. The literatures cited in the introduction section are old.
3. The methods to derive OSIs are not well documented.
4. The results and discussions need to be improved to make readers clearly understand what the findings were and how to implement them.

Author Response

Dear reviewer. We thank you for your comments and we changed the text accordingly. Please see below how we address each of your comments:

 

The authors intended to predict CWS through monitoring the crop growth. However, there are some serious issues that need to be addressed before considering this work for publication.

1. The manuscript needs extensive English editing - The manuscript was edited by the publisher's service.
2. The literatures cited in the introduction section are old - We added references four new references (numbers 8, 9, 13, and 16), all published after 2019.
3. The methods to derive OSIs are not well documented - We added a new figure, now Fig. 2, to better illustrate the different steps of this method
4. The results and discussions need to be improved to make readers clearly understand what the findings were and how to implement them - We wrote new two paragraphs in the Discussion to specifically address this point

 

Reviewer 3 Report

see report: definition of OSI must be clear and unambiguous

English should be improved.

Author Response

Dear reviewer. We thank you for your comments and we changed the text accordingly. Please see below how we address each of your comments:

see report: definition of OSI must be clear and unambiguous - We added a new figure, now Fig. 2, to better illustrate the different steps of this method

English should be improved - The manuscript was edited by the publisher's service.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I still have serious concerns about the water stress detecting strategies proposed because the relationship between the OSI values and crop water stress (by LWP or SWC) are not clearly identifiable in Fig.5 - 9.

The proofreading needs to be more careful. For examples,

1. the y-axis label should be OSI (not SSI) in Fig. 5 - 9.

2. it should be “changed” in line 122

… 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

 

We thank you for your comments, enable to improve our manuscript. Please find below our answers to each of your comments:

 

I still have serious concerns about the water stress detecting strategies proposed because the relationship between the OSI values and crop water stress (by LWP or SWC) are not clearly identifiable in Fig.5 - 9.

Authors:  We addressed this issue with new maps (Figure 10) illustrating differences inside the alfalfa field between no-stress and severe stress conditions, which was correspond to LWP measurements conducted at the same day. We also show that the crop LWP is better correlated to the OSI, while no linkage to the NDVI or the NDWI. The reader is referring to new Appendix, Appendix C, showing scatter plots of the LWP measurements versus the OSI, NDVI, and NDWI values, for all observations and images from the same date.

 

The proofreading needs to be more careful. For examples,

1. the y-axis label should be OSI (not SSI) in Fig. 5 - 9
2. it should be “changed” in line 122

Authors: thank you, both were corrected