Assessment of Deep Convective Systems in the Colombian Andean Region

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Author should avoid in writing "we",  "I" in whole documents. The conclusions may be short.

Author Response

Thanks for the suggestion of changing the "we" for "I". I will ask the editor about this change since I feel that the use of "I" sounds awkward in a research paper. I also edited the conclusions to present more in-depth my results.

Thanks.

Reviewer 2 Report

Please find my comments in the attached document.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thanks for the in-depth analysis and suggestion of my work. Considering your suggestions, I made significant changes to the manuscript.

I attached a word file with my responses to each one of your comments. 

Thanks.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors presented a study of characteristics of convective storms in the Colombian Andean region using C-band weather radar observations. Reading through the manuscript, it can be felt that the authors made significant efforts on analyzing data, which paved a good foundation towards a good publication. However, the quality of the presentation requires significant improvement.

 

A couple of major concerns:

1. It is unclear why the author would like to classify convective systems into enveloped and “uneveloped”, although we could see differences between two kinds of convections. Are there any differences, especially physical attributes and environmental conditions, for two kinds of convections? Do they contribute differently to heavy rainfalls? Do they pose different challengings in predicting its evolution and rainfall patterns? More justification needed. 

2. The author should explain, or explore, in Figure 5 and Figure 6, why such distributions are observed, not only simply stating such distributions. More interestingly, for convective storms, we see quite a number of cases whose reflectivity is even below 30dBZ. Why? Also looking at the shape of distribution, we see a very sharp ridge (like a peak, not smoothed) of the curve. That looks very abnormal. In the meantime, see Fig 6, why reflectivity cutted of at 25dBZ, but in Fig 5 some conventions have reflectivity below 25dBZ? Table 1, why maximum dBZ of all conventions is larger than both enveloped and uneveloped maximum as they’re all convections? BTW, did the author mean “non-enveloped” for word “uneveloped”.

3. The authors connected topography with convection systems, but that is merely at a level of “correlation”, could the author explain any causation, a few examples would be great.

 

Some minor points:

Line 104 Please provide gate spacing and azimuthal spacing.

Line 105  50 - 200km?

Line 107 any additional QC algorithms are employed? What percentage of bad data are removed?

Line 118, why 750hPa?

 

Finally, the English requires significant editing. Overall, it is understandable, but really read odds. Please consider consulting a professional editing service.

 

Author Response

Thanks for all your comments.

I significantly edited the manuscript following them.

Regarding the description of the radar: I expanded the information about it. However, I could not find some o the info you and the second reviewer were asking for.

Attached you can find my response to each of your comments.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

The topic is interesting, and the prose is well-developed. The research problem is scientifically investigated. The introduction must provide detailed information concerning radar reflectivity as well as supporting proof. Knowing the relationship between convective systems and radar reflectivity assessment will be beneficial.

There is a paucity of ground-truthing data to correlate the radar data result and convective storm to understand the primary cause of occurrence in the Colombian Andean region. To comprehend the actual result with particular latitude and longitude, including the names of all 18 watersheds and their subwatersheds.

 

To express the validity of the result, the author should include some supporting references in the conclusion section. It is suggested that the author includes some recent year references.

Author Response

Thanks for your suggestions.

I made changes to some figures and to the conclusions taking into account your review.

Attached, you can find a detail of my response to your comments.

Thanks

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

All reviews have been properly addressed by the author. 

Unfortunately I did not find the updated readme file in the repository. I highly encourage the author to revise this issue.

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors response looks good to me. I don't have any significant comment now.