3D Modeling Method for Dome Structure Using Digital Geological Map and DEM
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors took the recommendations of the reviewers into account and improved the paper.
Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript makes an excellent impression and is a complete serious study. The manuscript is well structured and written in good scientific language. In the Introduction, the authors provide a detailed review of current research.
The carefully described methodology is a very good material for understanding the author's approach. The abundance of drawings and diagrams allows you to follow the course of scientific thought. The Discussion and Summary reflect the main results of the research and fully reveal the intention and results of the future article.
The Conclusion summarizes the work and is the logical conclusion of the described research. The authors demonstrate their great knowledge of the subject, the study results are comprehensively presented and structured. The impressive list of references indicates a deep immersion into the study topic and fully reflects the current state of the study subject.
In my opinion, the article is ready for publication in the journal.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
I find the manuscript interesting, with the proposal of a technique for 3D modelling using the most commonly available data (surface information and DEM).
However, I would suggest you to contact an English-native speaker to help you with the editing of the language. Some parts are a bit hard to understand.
Also, I would recommend to include the dip-domain method (Fernández, 2004. UB PhD thesis; Fernández et al., 2004. AAPG Bulletin 88 (8): 1049-1068; Vidal-Royo et al., 2013. Geologica Acta 11 (1): 1-25) in the section about the existing modelling methods.
For the chapter about bedding dip calculation, I would suggest to consider including the method by Fernández (2005. Journal of Structural Geology 27 (5): 855-858.). It is like a variation of the classic three-points method but less susceptible to local irregularities, which helps finding the general orientation of the geological features in a more reliable way.
Author Response
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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 authors present in this paper a method for building 3D models of dome structures from geological map and DEM. Even if the approach could be still interesting to apply, it seems that: (1) it corresponds to a series of basic geometrical computations (point sampling, such as adding points in dip direction, Bézier curve for smoothing, Delaunay triangulations, burr and error tracking, etc.) that could not be as integrative as implicit approaches, as claimed by the authors; (2) the case study examples are not convincing and could be surely dealt with implicit approaches; (3) the explanations are really not clear: the Figure are not of required quality, there are inconsistencies in the explanations, the used vocabulary is not defined and there are errors in the terminologies; (4) some references are wrong.
All these points lead to the decision that this publication is rejected as the presented works are not so convincing and that the paper requires a lot of corrections.
I advise the authors to rework deeply their paper by:
- being more humble in the introduction on the objective of the proposed approach and its comparison to published approaches (e.g., published implicit geomodelling and knowledge-driven approaches). Focusing more on the interests of using the proposed approach: which ones (open source codes? Easy to apply and visualise? Fast to apply?)?
- specifying which is the interest to obtain a set of closed surfaces instead of a series of the ranked interface surfaces as usual (?).
- rewriting the explanations of the algorithms more clearly by: 1) defining the used vocabulary; 2) defining exactly in a subsection (such as “assumptions and input parameters”) the input data and parameters (H, parameters of smoothness, angle threshold, data points? Mapping interpretations? Plunge data? DEM, etc.); 3) redrawing the most of the Figures; 4) reworking the flow-chart figure by adding snapshots of intermediate results (such as done in the Table 3).
A deep review is available in the attached document for giving advice for the paper re-writing
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
Introduction: it is better to give subtitles to group the same topics together. Please also review the difference of basin and dome.
Page 4, Fig 1, need provide explanations of yellow boxes.
Page 7, line 205…. Authors said using four points is better, why authors want to use 3 and 4 points in this research? What is the reason for?
Fig 5, Font in the figure is too small.
Figure 6, the legend is larger than the figure.
In methodology, it is difficult to hardstand or follow. The authors also did not address validation method.
Case studies:
As a reader, I would like to see the location of the study areas and a picture to show the Wulongshan dome.
The 1:200000 geological map and 30m resolution DEM were used. Did the data match? Please explain.
Figure 10, not sure the DEM represents the Dome or Basin. There is 1664m elevation difference and the low value is 368m. it looks like it is a basin, not dome. Please provide more information of Wulongshan dome.
Please explain how you use DEM in your research.
There is no evidence in case studies which show that the authors use 3 and 4 points as mentioned in page 7.
The figures, legends, and font need to be balanced. You can not have a small figure with larger size legend. Therefore, all the figures need to be redone.
Figures quality also needs to be improved.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
Geological map and DEM are valuable data set in geological survey. How to rapidly construct a correct 3D model based on these data is a difficult problem. The paper introduces an automatic 3D modeling method for dome structure based on geological map and DEM. And the authors present two cases to show the applicability of this method. It is a meaningful experiment on geological modelling.
What is the reason that you choose Bezier curve? That is, can we use another curve to fit the line or surface?
Please use a same color for same geological units in figure 14(b) and figure 14(c), or label the legend text in figure 14(c).
“Figure 17. Richat structure vertical cut model based on different methods: (a) Perspective view of Richard structure [48]; (a) The vertical section model of Richard structure”. The second (a) should be (b). In addition, it is not easy to see the comparing results between (a) and (b).
Please analyze the performance of your method in this paper, especially time cost of this algorithm.
Conclusion : minor revision.
Author Response
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