Data-Free Area Detection and Evaluation for Marine Satellite Data Products
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors of this manuscript used ISAM to do information mining on the location of the data-free area of L1 products in the Bohai Sea and Yellow Sea, and analyzed and evaluated the satellite ocean color products (GOCI/MODIS/OLCI) from the perspective of information integrity and continuity. Overall, the manuscript describes methods and data processing in detail. The authors systematically proposed an analysis and evaluation method based on data-free area from a new perspective. The manuscript presents a useful contribution to a very important subject in satellite ocean color products in terms of quality. The findings may enrich the evaluation of ocean-color product quality. While, it also exist some issues, and my suggestions are as follows.
1. It is more suitable for the article to modify " of " to " for " about the topic " Data-free Area Information Mining and Evaluation of Marine Satellite Data Products ".
2. Lines 172-175: Description should be template text, please delete.
3. Line 393: " The lowest Kappa coefficient is 0.88 for MODIS.". To ensure the correctness of writing, it should be the same as described in the table. Also ensure that the word spelling in Table 8 is correct.
4. Adjust the font in Figure 10 to the appropriate size.
5. Lines 381-389: Simplify the description of confusion matrix.
6. The information in Table 6 and Table 7 overlap, and it is recommended to merge.
7. Line 406: “The differences in algorithms for cloud detection or noise removal processes may result in missing normal pixels of the data product”. This statement need evidence.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper proposed a method for data-free area information mining and evaluation of marine satellite data products. Overall, I have some suggestions and I hope they are helpful for the authors to improve the manuscript.
(1) The paper explore a method to detect data-free area of remote sensing images, the title should be changed to “data-free area detection”. I think that using a combining data from different times (GOCI, MODIS, OLCI) to fill data-free area may be the future development direction.
(2) Although the INTRODUCTION is well-written, but the Refs are so old, and the latest references should be cited.
(3) For Figure 1, the annotated latitude and longitude of subgraph can be removed.
(4) According to the different bands, the spatial resolution of MODIS can be divided into three 250 m, 500 m, and 10000 m. Therefore, the description in Table 1 should be more rigorous.
(5) For 2.3, the TITLE should be changed to METHODS, and the PREPROCESSING can be part of the METHOD in the form of a subheading.
(6) On page 7, is the threshold value [-0.05, 0.80] of NDVI for all three sensors? Whe not set it goes greater than -0.05?
(7) For figure 6, the Legend should be added.
(8) On Page 11, change usage accuracy to user accuracy.
(9) I would suggest the authors polish the English writing to make the manuscript clearer.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
In this paper, the authors focus on data-free areas at ocean color satellite imagery. They develop the method to detect and distinguish the areas of turbid water, green tide algae, clouds, and sea ice in the Yellow and Bohai seas, which result in data-free areas. They compare the results of method application to the GOCI, OLCI and MODIS ocean-color satellite products. The paper is well written and is of certain scientific and practical interest. Therefore, I recommend to accept this paper. My only recommendation is to expand the discussion if the obtained results for the Yellow and Bohai seas could be applied to other coastal regions in the World Ocean, which is very important for putting this research in a broader contex.
Author Response
Thank you very much for your valuable comments on our manuscript. Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have studied the comments carefully and have made a correction which we hope meet with approval.
Point 1: In this paper, the authors focus on data-free areas at ocean color satellite imagery. They develop the method to detect and distinguish the areas of turbid water, green tide algae, clouds, and sea ice in the Yellow and Bohai seas, which result in data-free areas. They compare the results of method application to the GOCI, OLCI and MODIS ocean-color satellite products. The paper is well written and is of certain scientific and practical interest. Therefore, I recommend to accept this paper. My only recommendation is to expand the discussion if the obtained results for the Yellow and Bohai seas could be applied to other coastal regions in the World Ocean, which is very important for putting this research in a broader contex.
Response 1: Thanks very much for your recognition and support for our research work. We fully agree with your proposal to apply the results to other coastal areas of the world ocean. But we take into account the complexity of the marine environment, such as the spatial differences of different sea areas, ecological differences, the impact of large-scale factors, and so on. We will apply the research results to other coastal areas combined with different coastal characteristics, which makes us need more rigorous preparation and thinking. This part will be our future research work, which we hope to show in the following work. Please allow us to add this outlook ("The obtained results for the Yellow and Bohai seas could be applied to other coastal regions in the World Ocean.") at the end of the article. Thank you again for your careful review and valuable suggestions.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
All of my concerns have been addressed, and I recommend to accept the paper for publication.
