The Temporal-Stability-Based Irrigation MAPping (TSIMAP) Method: A Virtuous Trade-Off between Accuracy, Flexibility, and Facility for End-Users

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In my opinion the article is very interesting for the reader and suitable for publication.  It presents the strength of NDVI to estimate irrigated regions and incorporate many aspects of the irrigation parameters used in remote sensing. Literature is very well presented and the Discussion part of the paper is very clear and straightforward. It is also very useful to know that this kind of methodology can be applied to other parameters like ET etc.

I would only like to check some big sentences and (if possible) reduce them or check the syntax. For example lines 252-256 or 261-269.

Thank you

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This research article was well edited based on authors' original research results.

Thus this research article may suitable for the publication of one of research articles for international journal, "Water".

However the editorial board need to check minor error in this research article followed by authors' reversion.

Please refer following.

[Minor reversion]

1) Figure 1.

Please add coordination such as "longitude" and "latitude".

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript presents an original application of the temporal stability derived irrigation mapping (namely TSIMAP) to detect land use (irrigated or not irrigated areas) for agriculture over a 10000 km2 area in the validation 1 experiment, and over 86000 km2 in the validation 2.

The manuscript is original, well-written, and provides additional knowledge and evidence on the use of remote sensing for land use mapping.

I found only two minor issues that I would ask the authors to fix before accepting the manuscript for publication.

l. 84-90: this section is repeated also in the introduction section. Please avoid repetitions. In my opinion, you should remove some details in the INTRO and keep it all for the "study site" chapter.

Citations: it looks like the authors are repeating too much some citations in the manuscript (for example Dari et al. [18] which I have found cited 17 times in the manuscript). Please avoid citing this work if not necessary. 

I would like to thank the authors for the interesting manuscript and suggest some areas to explore for future studies:

- as mentioned in the manuscript, evaluate different parameters (and their combinations) to take into consideration as many parameters as possible

- evaluate whether this approach could be used also for irrigation scheduling. At the moment, through TSIMAP, the authors can provide land use maps. Farmers would benefit from the TSIMAP if the tool can help them make irrigation decisions.

Best regards

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf