Evaluation of Groundwater Potential Using Aquifer Characteristics in Urambo District, Tabora Region, Tanzania

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

The manuscript with id earth-2534606 aims to assess the groundwater potential zones for Urambo, Tabora, Tanzania using Analytical Hierarchal Process within geospatial environment. The paper seems interesting and in the aims of the Journal. However, following are a few comments for further improvement.

1.      At the end of abstract, authors are advised to add a statement of significance that tells readers why the overall conclusion is important in the context of the wider field.

2.      Authors should turn off the track changes.

3.      Resolution and quality of all the images should be improved.

4.      The writing needs improvement. Also, having a native English speaker to go over the manuscript should be warranted.

5.      Legends as well as most of the map elements are missing in maps (See Fig. 7).

6.      Scale representing the map to ground distance is missing in Fig. 8.

7.      Please update the map in Fig. 9 by adding the missing elements.

8.      Based on your findings/conclusions, suggest a few areas for future research.

9.      Introduction section should be improved by the specifically including what has been studied or known over this area and what has not been studied and how the current work contributes.

10.  Please check the manuscript for grammatical sense. There are several typo errors in the manuscript.

The writing needs improvement. Also, having a native English speaker to go over the manuscript should be warranted. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Please, receive the attached file of  major revisions for further action.

Regards,

Athuman Yohana

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Dear Authors,

I've examined your manuscript with great interest. It is based on a novel, methodologically strong research. I fully agree that such local studies deserve publication in "Earth" because, in fact, they have international importance. On the one hand, they add the knowledge from the poorly-known areas. On the other hand, they deal with the environmental issues important to entire Africa. I really like your work, but I thinks some additions and improvements are necessary.

1. Results MUST be separated from Discussion. These should become different sections, as commonly requested in high-class journals. Discussion should offer interpretations of your findings: why things are so as documented? how do they correspond to what has been reported from the other African countries? what are the socio-economical implications? Reflect the additions to Discussion inabstract and Conclusions.

2. I think geological and hydrogeological cross-sections would be very helpful. Those available are promising, but they should be designed better and without so specific pattern.

3. Fig. 2 shows not only crystalline rocks, but also clays and sands. What are their age and the hydrogeological importance? Again, what about tectonic elements...

4. Conclusions: please, state the limitations of this study and the perspectives for future research. Merge with the following brief section.

5. Please, avoid splitting the text into too many subsections. Please, try to merge your small subsections.

6. Fig. 2: the source?

7. Indeed, such a paper should cite much more articles published in top international journals.

8. The quality of the figures should be better. Now, many figures remain almost unreadable.

The writing is perfect, in my opinion.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Please receive the attached file of major revisions

Regards,

Athuman Yohana

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Dear Authors,

thanks for your revisions! The manuscript looks a bit better, but I still see some fundamental things to improve.

1) The geological additions are written very unprofessionally with some elementary errors. For instance, neither Archean, nor Cenozoic were periods! Please, look at the International Geological Time scale (you can find it here: stratigraphy.org). There are many simplifications. Nothing is told about the local tectonics... I recommend to cooperate with any professional geologists, who may easily explain you what to do and how to write.

2) Discussion is available, but it deals with too local issues. Please, look at my recommendations given previously.

The text in the added parts need linguistic polishing. The quality of the figures (for instance, lithological logs) must be improved.

The text in the newly-added parts need linguistic polishing. 

Author Response

Hi,

Please see the attached file for further action.

Regards,

Yohana

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Dear Authors,

thanks for your improvements! The manuscript looks better and I feel possible to recommend it for publication. I only advise you to try to improve the quality (resolution or size) of images at the stag eof proof check.

The writing is clear. I see some typos and misspellings, but I hope these will be improved together with the proof production, as this is usually done by MDPI.

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 manuscript with earth-2100168 ID aims at evaluating the groundwater potential zonation and spatial distribution of potentially viable locations. The article mostly fits the scope of Earth Journal, however, following are a few recommendations that should be incorporated before the final publishing.

1.    Abstract should be free from unnecessary headings. Remove the heading placed on line 19.

2.    Unnecessary spaces placed before the citations at lines 58 and 64 should be removed.

3.    Labels placed over the sampling points are not clear in Figure 1. Moreover, the legends placed on right of the map has its text intersecting the map border and should be positioned properly. Also, the point features should be placed on top in the legend, following the line features underneath and polygons should be there on the bottom of legends.

4.    North sign placed on inset map of Tanzania Administrative Boundary is not clear and should be modified for clarity/ visibility.

5.    What is the justification of adopting the particular NASA mission for meteorological data as indicated on line 106? Explanation for using the NASA data with complete specification, resolution and details should be added. Because there are many other missions with much better temporal and spatial resolution, therefore justification of selecting the particular data should be made.

6.    Placement of labels and font on most of the graphs should be revised for clarity and aesthetics of figures.

7.    Extra spaces and other typo errors throughout the manuscript should be re-checked for instance, see lines 140, 188, 206, and 225.

8.    There are many methods and tools available to perform the spatial interpolation. Justify the reason of selecting/ using IDW approach. Why did not the authors utilize kriging or trend surface estimation? Please explain with logic.

9.    Line spacing from 289-316 is not same as that utilized in other sections of manuscript. Please recheck.

10.  “Tested boreholes” feature in the legend area in Figure 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 should be placed on top of the legend. Also, the graticules/ grids are not clear and font size of respective labels of grids should be revised.

11.  Resolution of Figure 5, 6, 7 and 8 is too low to understand/read the presented information.

12.  Bottom border of the map on top of Figure 11 and 12 is hidden. Also, the letters A and B on top of the map are not explained. What do the two letters represent?

13.  Scale for both the maps placed on top and bottom in Figure 11 and 12 are not same. In case the spatial extent of the two boundaries is same, then same scale should be used for the two maps.

14.  Instead of placing the screenshot of AHP worksheet, a separate table with proper formatting should be added. Please see Figure 22.

15.  Based on the findings and study limitations, please include recommendation for future research.

Author Response

Hello!

Please, receive the attached file of response

regards,

Athuman.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Unfortunately, this manuscript does not have the appearance of an academic paper and is not considered worthy of publication.

There are too many figures and tables (There are 22 figures and 7 tables).

It is understandable that they represent valuable data for the specific region studied.

However, it consists only of figures and short descriptions of the results, making it more of a report than academic paper.

It is also too verbose and does not summarize the main points of the paper.

The formatting is also broken and readers will not be inclined to read it.

The contents of 2.8, 4.5, and 3.6 may be important points, and we suggest that you reconsider the structure of the paper focusing on these points.

Author Response

Hello!

Please, receive the attached file of response

regards,

Athuman.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The study applied a customized indicator-based methodology for the evaluation of 563 groundwater potential zones in a granitic gneiss aquifer formation of Urambo district. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was applied to assess the groundwater resources potential of the study area. The manuscript is very well written with very good illustrations.  I recommend the manuscript after moderate revision for publication in your respective and popular EARTH MPDI journal. However, there are several comments that need to be considered:

1.       The labels of figures 11, 12, 17,18,19, and 20 are not of legal size.

2.       It is better to show the contour values in Figure 5

3.       Figure 6 is repeated in figure 14 (Why showing two lithological maps for the same site)

4.       I strongly recommend drawing groundwater contours with flow lines in Figure 9

5.       Please discuss why the TDS is high where most of the production wells are located.

6.       The hydrogeological setting section is very brief and one or two hydrogeological cross-sections will help in defining the setting since the authors already show several lithological logs in Figures 17-20.

7.       Which software was used to interpret the pumping test data?

Author Response

Hello!

Please, receive the attached file of response

regards,

Athuman.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The redundancy of the manuscript does not seem to have been improved, and the response letter by the author was not at all clear where and how the revisions were made. As originally pointed out, it would be better to reconsider the structure and improve it so that less important information and figures are sent to the supplements.

Also, how would the author emphasize the novelty and originality of this paper?　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　

Author Response

Hello,

Please receive the attached file for further action.

Regards,

Athuman Yohana

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf