Climatic Trends in Different Bioclimatic Zones in the Chitwan Annapurna Landscape, Nepal

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The submitted manuscript deals with the climatic trends in a part of Nepal focused on bioclimate. The authors used a time series of air temperature and precipitation data covering a period almost 50 years long. The title and the content are suitable for the aims and scopes of the Climate journal, but the paper is immature. Besides, the research is weak in terms of methodology and a comprehensive presentation.

Authors must rewrite the manuscript taking into account that they must declare their scope, their methodology and present their findings in an understandable and tidy way.

General Comments

• Authors must rewrite the abstract describing first the problem statement if there is so. After that, they must briefly indicate the methodology, and finally, they must note the main findings along with the principal conclusion. They should avoid a lot of numbers and the total of results figures. Moreover, authors must take care of the spaces of the text and their English.
• The keywords should be more informative, and it would be helpful not to be included in the paper title.
• The introduction is noticeably short; thus, authors must expand it and deploy the state of the art of the topic. Moreover, they should enrich this section with the most related yet recent bibliography. They must describe why this research is important; why the findings are important for the world scientific society?
• Authors should check the whole manuscript for missing spaces. A lot of words must be separated from text spaces.
• The manuscript is full of names and abbreviations and it so not providing the readability of the paper. Taking this into account, authors must try to generalize their method and results presentations.

Specific Comments

40. 40. Authors must refer to the type of “unpredictable problems for livelihoods” since it strength the importance of the research.
41. 48-56. Authors must introduce the problem and their approach to this problem.

• All tables must be reconstructed, aligned etc.

ll.92-94. The sentence is unclear. Please rewrite this.

103. 103. Figure 2 must be combined with Figure 3
104. 106. Authors mention that “the temperature was analyzed only from LTBZ and TBZ in this study”, but where are those zones in the maps?
105. 106-111. There is a mess about the station and the measurements, so authors must refer clearly what type of data they used, and why they used them.

ll.113. It is not scientific at all to check meteorological data of an almost 40-years period, manually. Authors must apply some statistic test for the outliers and the detection of anomalies or mistakes.  

162. 162. It is unclear if there are trends for the rainfall variance. Authors must draw lines to present the trends, if there are so.
163. 177. It is not familiar to present trends with bar plots. Please select the appropriate graph for trends.
164. 194. It is unclear if there are trends for the air temperature variance. Authors must draw lines to present the trends, if there are so.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting manuscript  that, however, needs to be improved.

Such a large area of a country cannot be a landscape, but is composed of numerous landscapes. Perhaps the authors should review their concept of 'landscape'. Chitwan Annapurna Landscape (CHAL) area cannot be a single landscape.

If the authors write about landscape, they should indicate what vegetation exists for each bioclimatic zone, even if it is in a general sense. This would increase the interest of the work, and in addition, it would be possible to observe what is the trend of the vegetation due to climatic changes.

In the manuscript, there are also many deficiencies of presentation:

Lines 42-43: Please, preserve a separation between words.

Lines 49-50: Please, preserve a separation between words, and review it in all the text.

Line 96: Change ‘Annex’ to ‘Annexes’.

Line 124: Reference 2, should be indicated before 25 and 26.

Lines 137-140: This paragraph presents a different font style.

Lines 145-148: This paragraph presents a different font style.

Table 2 should be included before figure 4, because table 2 is indicated earlier in the text than figure 4. Please improve the presentation of the table: the table headings should not be split.  There are numbers in bold and others in normal font.

Table 3 should be placed before figure 5, as it is mentioned earlier in the text.

Table 4 has a different format than the other tables. In addition, the columns are offset from the header. All tables should have a similar format.

In table 5, the presentation needs to be improved. All tables should have the same presentation. The font style does not correspond to the text. Numbers should be at the same height between cells. In some cells, values are missing and the reason is not explained.

Line 224: Is this figure <4000 mm correct? Please check it.

Line 226: Is the figure >400 m correct? Please check it.

Lines 290-292: This paragraph has a different font style.

Lines 331-333: And what is the trend with the rainfall? It should be added as the authors did with temperatures.

References: The references must be homogeneous: with the same pointing, the same way of indicating the DOI, etc. There are names of journals abbreviated and others that are not. Please, review all the references!

Annexes: Please improve the presentation of the annexes. The font style is different from the text. The letters of the words cannot be separated in the headings.

In certain bioclimatic zones the units of altitude asl are indicated (e.g. 500-1000 m) and in others not (e.g. 1000-1500?). In Annex 2, if the words in the headings begin in capital letters, they must all begin in capital letters; 'latitude' is in lower case.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The revised version of the manuscript is substantially improved. Also, the authors have been answered to all comments adequately.

The only point that needs improvement to go further is the graphics presentation. Illustrations came from the excel is very “basic”. So, I suggest presenting their results (figures 4, 5 and 6) using something more professional. Moreover, authors should add in figure 4 and 6 the Sen’s slope values close to the bioclimatic zones lines.

Author Response

Response  to the reviewer comments

                                                                                         9^th November, 2020

 Dear Editor                                                                                                          The authors (Dol Raj Luitel, Pramod K. Jha, Mohan Siwakoti, Madan Lall Shrestha and Muniappan Rangaswami) of manuscript ID Climate 975811 entitled " Climatic trend in different bioclimatic zones in Chitwan Annapurna Landscape, Nepal" submitted to the Climate Journal, are very much thankful for reviewer valuable comments. We tried to incorporate respected reviewer comments seriously. We carefully went through the comments and made appropriate change on point-by-point response. Below is an itemized list of changes we made for each comment and are presented in track changes.

Response of individual comment

1. Graphic presentations are now improved. However, reviewer suggested to make figures by using more professional software other than Microsoft excel. I have very humble request to the reviewer that I am unable to use other professional software without learning and I need to ask some one to help on it which is also beyond the possible right now due to current situation within time limit. So, I used Microsoft excel 2010, also a professional software to make our graphic presentation better.
2. Values of sense slope are presented in the figure 4 and 6.

Thank you 

Sincerely yours

Dol Raj Luitel