Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

The revised manuscript is fine and answer my question well. I recommend it accpeted.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Suggestions:

Change the term "catchment characteristics" to "watershed characteristics" and standardize throughout the article.

 

In item 2.1. Study Area

Insert a table with the information of the evaluated stations (name, latitude, longitude, altitude, data period, percentage of failures). It will allow understanding the groupings performed in Figures 3 and 4 (results).

In item 2.2.1. Statistical Analysis

What reanalysis methodology (example: ERA-5 or other) was used in filling in the satellite-based data?

In item 2.2.2. Landuse/cover change analysis

According to the authors ...RF (random forest) in comparison to other classifiers, it produces higher classification accuracy, needs less model training time, and is less sensitive to training samples... vegetation patterns in the region, because in transition areas or dry periods, significant errors may occur.

 

In the “Results” section

There is no identification of the axes in the graphs and measurement units, making it difficult to understand.

In the results of Figure 10, it would be more interesting to use the indices defined by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection Monitoring and Indices (ETCCDMI) and International Rearch Program on Climate Variability and Predictability (CCI/CCLIVAR), which are more widely accepted for monitoring climate variability regional.

Figure 12 is confusing as it does not present a color legend for the correlations.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 

The manuscript presents statistical work to examine the rainfall variability with catchment size, elevation, and landuse/cover change. The topic is interesting however lacks the proper interpretation of the finding. Several acronyms are not defined with no clear methodology. The major drawback of the work is the lack of discussion on the results. Major concerns are listed below:

 (i)                 What instruments are used and which parameters are retrieved? What is the temporal resolution of the data? State the data quality also.

(ii)               Discussion on the results is very poor. The findings are not compared with earlier works and lack physical interpretation.

(iii)             P7: ….rainfall variability increases in warmer climate. What is the reason?

(iv)             P8: …variation in Lower Baro is greater than that of Sor and Geba. How significant are the variations? I wonder why the monthly scales have fewer variations while the seasonal scale shows apparent variations.

(v)               P8: What is the mechanism to understand the variability between temperature and topography.

(vi)              Fig.13: Why is there a peak in 2012?

(vii)           P13: Precipitation variability can be affected by several factors (not only from Catchment size, Topography and Landuse/cover) like humidity, winds etc. How are those factors important?

(viii)         P13: … indicating that as elevation increases, rainfall variability decreases. Why? Usually, it is the opposite.

 

Specific points:

P2: GEV parameters: Expand and explain.

P4: Daily meteorological and gridded data… How many station data are used for gridding? What's the spatial resolution of the data? State the data quality.

P5: researchers discovered … Change it to “researchers found” . Discovered word has to be replaced by found.

P5: homogeneity test.. What is this test?

P5: What do lowland and highland part mean?

P6: What is CV? Do you mean coefficient of variation?

In general, figure quality is too poor, particularly the axis marks and labels.

P9: The coefficient of variation….. based on their analysis. The repeated sentence, as mentioned earlier.

What is meteorological variability?

P10: The Baro basin is…. its threshold value. Very general paragraphs. It needs to be shortened and maybe moved to the methodology section.

Reviewer 2 Report

This study investigates the relationship between precipitation/temperature and catchment size, landuse/cover and topography. However, I think that meteorological dynamics not only means precipitation and temperature, the statement used in the manuscript is not appropriate and confusing. I think the manuscript needs a huge improvement; I recommend the manuscript resubmitted after major revision. Major comments are list as below:

(1)   Analysis in the manuscript lacks sufficient information about topography, landuse/cover and catchment size, including data source, definition and the corresponding figures. Furthermore, there are large missing values in meteorological station data, how the author deals with meteorological station data and combines with gridded is not clear. Therefore, from my perspective the result is not so robust.

(2)   I think figure 3 and figure 4 give nothing information. However, we need to know about landuse/cover, NDVI, and meteorological information of the basin, but I can get enough information in the manuscript.

(3)   All figures in the manuscript are in low quality and methodologies are not clear. There are much less stations in Figure 3 than Figure 1/9.

(4)   Several important definitions are not clear in the manuscript, such as what is CV and RF in Figure 16.

(5)   Correlation coefficients contain limited information but the author lacks further investigation. And it is not to mention “quantifying analysis”.

(6)   Writing skills needs to be improved and the introduction is really worse that I cannot figure out the points.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf