Water Balance of a Small Island Experiencing Climate Change

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is an interesting and informative paper.  Data scacity is always a big problem for places like Norfolk Island.  I appreciate authors' effort to complile all avaible infomation from previous studies and came out with such a complete analysis.  Hpoefully, the results from this work will get  attention from government agencies and leads to support for continuous study. 

The paper is too long and needs to be condensed. Although it is already long,  I suggest authors to include some discussions on the impact of sea level to the hydrology. Is there any correlation? 

Another missing piece for water balance is the groundwater discharge to the ocean.  What is the significance of this interface?

Figure 2-2 is referred, but not included in the manuscript.

The blue line in Figure 2 needs explanation.

 

Author Response

We thank you for your time and considered opinion on our submission. Our responses to suggestions are in the attached document

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The article aims to determine the hydrological balance of Norfolk Island in the South Pacific.

One of the authors' objectives is to verify the modification of the aforementioned balance due to the climatic changes of the last decades.

Unfortunately, the availability of past data is scarce and in many cases, the analyses have low statistical value.

In general, the uncertainty deriving from the lack of data, from measurement errors, and from the modeling used for the analysis is very high and the authors themselves highlight it.

Despite this, the work is interesting in my opinion worthy of being published.

Detailed remarks:

page 5 row 149: you say that mean runoff is reduced as a consequence of ‘declining groundwater-surface water connection’ (sealing of soil?) also in the wetter year. What about peak runoff?

page 5 row 158: define the acronym RHRWS

page 5 row 185 change Penmen-Monteith in Penman-Monteith

page 6 row 188: the temperature in degrees Celsius (° C)

page 10 formula (6): please justify the choice of the objective function

page 12 row 404: NSE should be for 'Nash and Sutcliffe Efficiency', but don't say it, please explain.

page 14 paragraph 3.2. Can you display a map of the potentiometric surfaces?

page 21 figure 11. The observed data curve (orange line) is not visible, perhaps it would be better to represent these data with points

Author Response

We thanks you for your time and suggestions. Please see attached document for our responses

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Please see the file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for their time and effort in reviewing our manuscript. We agree that the manuscript is long and have made some effort to reduce it's size

Reviewer 4 Report

This paper is well written. The authors clearly described the methods and discussed the results and some caveats. I recommend it for publication with some minor checks in possible language issues. 

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for their time and effort. We have responded to edit suggestions.