Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors;

I believe your manuscript is interesting and within the aims and scope of Water. You have presented a good database that is helpful for further investigations to support local decision makers in developing sustainable groundwater resources programs. However, the manuscript needs major revisions in the current format to get ready for publication in an international journal such as Water. I have appended my suggestions/revisions below for your consideration:

1- Abstract need a full rewritten. This section is too long. Please reduce it to less than 300 words or less.

2- Please replace “mg/l” with “mg/L” across the manuscript.

3- Please reduce the number of keywords.

4- Introduction, First Paragraph: Can you please add more descriptions about the challenge related to the transboundary rivers? I suggest the authors to look at: “https://doi.org/10.3390/hydrology9120207”.

5- Introduction: the manuscript title is related to health risk assessment. But, no information given in Introduction about the human health risks induced by using the polluted groundwater, especially with heavy metals. I would like to see a paragraph about the impact of polluted groundwater on sustainable development and human health risks. Obviously, you need to support your description with appropriate references such as “a non-threshold model to estimate carcinogenic risk of nitrate-nitrite in drinking water”, “Metal contamination assessment in water column and surface sediments of a warm monomictic man-made lake: Sabalan Dam Reservoir, Iran”, and “Alarming carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic risk of heavy metals in Sabalan dam reservoir, Northwest of Iran”.

6- Can you please redrawn Figure 1 so that it clear shows the neighbor countries?

7- I suggest the authors to move Figure 4 and Table 2 to SM.

8- Can you please add a geological map of your study area to the manuscript? It can facilitate the natural origin of pollution in the studied region.

9- Table 3: It would be better to add the raw data to the manuscript. Alternatively, you can add it to SM If it needs a large table.

10- Section 3.1: I would like to see a comparison between the state of your groundwater quality with those reported in regional scales such as “Iran’s groundwater hydrochemistry”.

11- Conclusions: I strongly suggest the authors to avoid referring to literature in this section.

Good luck!

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your time with detailed feedback!

The response file is attached; the updates and corrections are shown in the manuscript with the change tracking mode.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Please see the attachment.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your time with detailed feedback!

The response file is attached; the updates and corrections are shown in the manuscript with the change tracking mode.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors;

Thank you for addressing my comments. My suggestion is acceptance. Congratulations.

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript is much improved. The authors have done a great job of responding to comments all over the article and improving the English as well. This manuscript will make a good contribution to the literature as a research article. Thank you for all your efforts. I recommend to accept this article to publish.