Evaluation of Pre-Earthquake Anomalies of Borehole Strain Network by Using Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The scope of this manuscript is the Evaluation of pre-earthquake anomalies of borehole strain network by using Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve.

 

Overall, I think this is a really interesting paper with enough data and sufficient and informative figures.

 

I have some major concerns though about the manuscript.

• First of you talk about earthquakes without mentioning the fault structures of the area. What is the tectonic regime of the area? What type of faults do you have normal? Reverse? which are dominant in the area? What is their geometry? In your opinion is the kinematics of a fault influencing the results?
• You mention 29 earthquakes. Magnitude? Where exactly? It would be nice to give a figure with the epicenters AND a table presenting a couple information about them (such as date, magnitude, depth, type of fault etc.)
• You mention that you examined the area for a period for seven years. During this time how many earthquakes have occurred? Apart from these you mention in discussion has your model correlated with any other earthquakes?
• You mention that only major earthquakes can easily correlated and therefore predicted. Meaning? An earthquake of M=5? Or M=5.5? How big must an earthquake be, to be predicted by your model?

 

• Finally, and most important, earthquakes are related with procedures which occur at least several km beneath the surface. Here we see a methodology based on data extracted from shallow boreholes (no more than 50 m depth). In your opinion are these data sufficient to run this model, or data extracted from deeper boreholes are required? If so, at least you have to mention it as limitations of the followed methodology.

 

In my opinion, you should add a subchapter to the results showing the correlation of the predicted anomalies with the three earthquakes mentioned id discussion. You should ask why do we have this here? Were these earthquakes stronger? Was the epicenter near to a borehole?

 

 

Within the attached manuscript you will find my comments in detail.

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We are very grateful to your comments for the manuscript. They have important guiding significance for our manuscript and our research work. We have revised the manuscript according to your comments.

Please the attachment. 

The PDF consists of three parts:

(1) A point-by-point response to the your comment;

(2) A manuscript with highlighted changes;

(3) A revised manuscript with the new MDPI templete.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

The manuscript entitled "Evaluation of pre-earthquake anomalies of borehole
strain network by using Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve" deals with important and scientifically sound issue of strain changes relation to earthquakes. You aimed in the detection of anomalies before the major earthquake using the strainmeter network. It is ambitious and important challenge, but Your manuscript suffers with significant shortcomings. The fundamental flaw of this work is lack of the proper description of the data used in the study. There is no description of how many earthquakes were located in the time range covered by this study. No information about completeness of the seismic catalog. This is critical for the readers to know it. Without having it all the authors efforts are insignificant, because readers don't know what exactly is studied. More detailed comments are in the atached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We are very grateful to your comments for the manuscript. They have important guiding significance for our manuscript and our research work. We have revised the manuscript according to your comments.

Please the attachment. 

The PDF consists of three parts:

(1) A point-by-point response to the your comment;

(2) A manuscript with highlighted changes;

(3) A revised manuscript with the new MDPI templete.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors, I am completely satisfied from your modifications.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1, we appreciate your satisfaction from our modifications and your acceptance for our work.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

I find corrected manuscript much clearer and significantly improved than the earlier version. However, there are still some minor issues I would like to point out. First, I miss the explanaition why only shallow earthquakes are taken into account. What about deeper ones during the time covered by the study? If some major M>6 deep event happened it is very likely, that it may influence the observations. Second, I found out that some of the target events were a part of the foreshock-mainshock-aftershock sequence (details in the attached commented manuscript). I didn't find any explanation if  why You treated them as a separate events. I would recommend to treat the sequence as one event, because it is governed by the same process in the same time. Any deformation and anomalies detected are very likely to be originated directly by the same process. Third, maybe I was not reading carefuly enough, but I didn't find any summary how the method worked for all targeted events. It would be nice to have sentence or figure showing how many of the targeted events were were preceded by the significant anomalies detected.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1,

Thank you for your satisfaction of our modifications.

We have revised the manuscript according to your new comments. The response to each revision is in the attachment.

Please find it in the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf