Groundwater Health Risk Assessment Based on Monte Carlo Model Sensitivity Analysis of Cr and As—A Case Study of Yinchuan City

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

General comments

Zhiyuan Ma et al. submitted a paper to the journal Water (MDPI) titled " Groundwater Health Risk Assessment based on Monte Carlo 2 Model Sensitivity Analysis of Cr and As – A Case Study of Yin Chuan City. The authors have done a good job and the manuscript is designed nicely with sound methodology and a good dataset. However, the manuscript needs to be addressed very precisely and irrelevant things should be deleted from the manuscript. Authors should focus on groundwater contamination and its impact on human health and therefore related things with study can be focused mainly. Some basic statistics such as ANOVA can be added for studying the significant difference among the various parameters.

Specific comments  

1)     The introduction seems to be very lengthy and I suggest making it very concise because it is a universal issue and everybody is very familiar with the concept. Authors can focus more on the issue related to the study area.

2)     Please be specific regarding the objective of the study?

3)     Location and climate should be discussed precisely. Similarly, topography and geomorphology should be very precisely discussed.

4)     Why HI index is not compared with standard values. Compare and validate your results with those comparisons.  

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript, water-1809426-peer-review-v1- entitled "Groundwater Health Risk Assessment based on Monte Carlo Model Sensitivity Analysis of Cr and As – A Case Study of Yin-chuan City," is well written and has potential, but it should be more organized. This research investigates the effects of chemical elements in groundwater on human health and the human health risk of drinking groundwater.

In my opinion, a careful revision of the English language should be carried out as there currently are some unclear sentences. The study seems to be well designed. The methodology and results are technically sound. Discussions on the scientific and practical values of the study, the limitations of proposed models, and future work are meaningful. I recommend accepting this manuscript after revision. The main concerns are as follows:

1)     The first and second paragraphs are too general and should explain more about the importance of  groundwater health risk assessment

2)     Some abbreviations in the paper have already not been addressed in the text. Like sensitivity analysis

3)     More recent references might support the first and second paragraphs of the introduction. Some references and literature are pretty old. The authors should read and use the newly published papers in their research.

4)     More literature review about the other methods is needed. The manuscript could be substantially improved by relying and citing more on recent literature about contemporary real-life case studies of sustainability and/or uncertainty, such as the followings.

·        Eskandari, E., Mohammadzadeh, H., Nassery, H., Vadiati, M., Zadeh, A. M., & Kisi, O. (2022). Delineation of isotopic and hydrochemical evolution of karstic aquifers with different cluster-based (HCA, KM, FCM and GKM) methods. Journal of Hydrology, 609, 127706.

·        Pavlides, A., Agou, V. D., & Hristopulos, D. T. (2022). Non-parametric Kernel-Based Estimation and Simulation of Precipitation Amount. Journal of Hydrology, 127988.

·        Nerantzaki, S., & Papalexiou, S. M. (2021). Assessing extremes in hydroclimatology: A review on probabilistic methods. Journal of Hydrology, 127302.

·        Rezaei, K., & Vadiati, M. (2020). A comparative study of artificial intelligence models for predicting monthly river suspended sediment load. Journal of Water and Land Development.

·        Fawad, M., Cassalho, F., Ren, J., Chen, L., & Yan, T. (2022). State-of-the-Art Statistical Approaches for Estimating Flood Events. Entropy, 24(7), 898.

5)     I recommend providing a table containing the advantages and disadvantages of the monte carlo model sensitivity analysis based on the literature review and comparing the applied methodology and the similar methodologies.

6)     For readers to quickly catch your contribution, it would be better to highlight significant difficulties and challenges and your original achievements to overcome them more straightforwardly in the abstract and introduction.

7)     Providing a comprehensive flowchart is highly recommended by researchers, so please add a flowchart representing the methodology in the paper.

8)     Yin-chuan City is adopted as the case study. What are other feasible alternatives? What are the advantages of adopting this case study over others in this case? How will this affect the results? The authors should provide more details on this.

9)     Cr and As are selected to apply the methodology. What are other feasible alternatives? What are the advantages of adopting this case study over others in this case? How will this affect the results? The authors should provide more details on this.

10)  Fig.s 2, 3 and 4 could be improved by adding more detail and comparing the other studies.

11)  I suggest explaining more about Fig.s 2, 3 and 4 since it is the core of the current research.

 

12)  It is important to describe the samples and the sampling protocol better since we are trying to understand the data variability. What are the advantages of adopting these parameters over others in this case? How will this affect the results? More details should be furnished.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf