Regional Rainfall Regimes Affect the Sensitivity of the Huff Quartile Classification to the Method of Event Delineation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments on “Regional rainfall regimes affect the sensitivity of the Huff 2 quartile classification to the method of event delineation” by David Dunkerley

This paper classifies the rainfall events observed from the two locations Millaa Millaa (145°39' E, 17°27' S) and Broken Hill (141°42'E, 116 31°05'S)  of Australia based on the Huff classifications. The author has worked testing the sensitivity of the Huff classification. Thus I suggest the change the title of the paper as “Sensitivity test of Huff classification using the rainfall events over Australia” In the abstract, MIT is described as a minimum 6-hour rainless inter-event time. He also mentioned other values of the MIT criteria, which is not clear. Later author describes the different values of MIT ranging from 30 min to 1 day. It is confusing to understand the abstract.  

What the author wants to describe here is that minimum inter-event time (MIT), that is time period before and after the rainfall event, is a sensitive parameter for the classification of the rainfall. Since Huff has fixed MIT as 6 h, the author is not satisfied with it and he tries to explain that variable MIT ranging from 30 min to 1 day needs to be incorporated for better classification than simply taking the MIT = 6 h. Further, he addressed that choice of the MIT must be based on the locations such as dryland or wetland.

The author also pointed out that several studies considered the MIT ranging from 30 min to 7 days (L61). However, later he posed several questions about the Huff classifications based on the choice MIT is confusing (L88).

Thus, this work is though well written, it does not have a clear problem statement and concise conclusion.  The discussion is too lengthy. I suggest the author to rewrite the full manuscript and provide a concrete conclusion. The whole manuscript describes the problems on the Huff classification, however, a conclusion is not finally drawn on the concerns raised. It would be better to extend the Huff work and conclude the result.

A few minor comments

L54-59: The author fails to describe the Huff classification clearly here. It is difficult to understand the minimum inter-event time (MIT). What is ‘inter-event time’?  In the abstract, MIT is described as a minimum 6-hour rainless inter-event time.

L30: Abbreviate indices like I5, I15, I30 , used in the paper.

L32: Which Scheme author mentioned here?

L53: List the incompleteness of Huff classifications

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

My main comments:

A not very thorough review of the literature, influencing inter alia the selection of extreme values of MIT for research.

Low accuracy (sensitivity) of the rain gauge in the area of FG  (0.5 mm).

Table 7 is the same as Table 6 (!?). There is "%Q2" instead of "%2Q".

A strange (not practical) description of time - the "X" axis in the figures.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I have no comments.