Water Evaporation Reduction Using Sunlight Splitting Technology

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article presents an interesting experiment to test the ability of a glass shed covered with multilayer film (GMF) to reduce evaporation and thus conserve water in the soil. It is well written and well organised. The results are adequately discussed and interesting in their conclusions. The paper requires some modifications before being accepted

1) Test site section: it is necessary to expand this section by including a climatological description of the area (e.g. precipitation regime, temperature regime), also using open source indications such as Koppen classification or ERA5 explorer from Copernicus Climate Datastore.
2) The figures have a very low quality. Please improve them
3) The soil considered might influence the results; probably a discussion on constraints on this point, referring to work in this field with other soil types might be needed.
4) Same as point 3 for tank size. Usually, for evaporation studies it is suggested to use flat tanks to maximise the exchange interface between soil and atmosphere. A major problem is the accuracy of the instrument used to weigh the tanks, since this type of experiment requires decimal or centesimal resolution. The initial condition of water capillarity is OK, but of course it must be stressed that the time of increase of the water content depends on the type of soil.
5) Soil deposition: Is the same porosity ensured for all experiments? Please include considerations on this point
6) It should be relevant to give some considerations on how this system in a climate change perspective could represent a best practice for soil water control.
7) Conclusions: please remove This section is not mandatory but can be added to the manuscript if the discussion is unusually long or complex.

For your interest, a potential improvement of this work is to model this process numerically, validating your model with observations and then testing it by considering different forcings (e.g. also rainfall history and potential evapotranspiration) as well as different soil types.

Author Response

Dear: Reviewer 

 

Thank you for your review and your comments, which undoubtedly helped improve the revised manuscript. We have addressed all the comments point-by-point responses in the attached file:

 

With best regards,

Yours Sincerely,

Ming Li

mingxin@ustc.edu.cn

2022-04-20

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors, please consider the comments below:

1.    All of analysed objects are “bare soil” without plants, so the name for first object should be changed eg. “no shaded”, “ open”
2.    The introduction consist mainly information on influence of mulching on surface evaporation, no information about the previous research on impact of agrivoltaics on surface evaporation. 
3.    Simple regression function not fit the cumulative soil surface evaporation till the 10th day (figure 5). In my opinion another type of function should be taken to describe this relation.
4.    There is no information about temperature differences (gradients) between the analysed objects in experiment, such analysis should be described in results section. 
5.    Chapter 4.1 deliver new information, it is not discussion, can be integrated to Introduction if it supplemented with references.
6.    Chapter 4.2- 4.3 - no references, this part needs to be seriously supplemented with a discussion connecting other studies on reduction in water evaporation under artificial shading.

Author Response

Dear: Reviewer 

 

Thank you for your review and your comments, which undoubtedly helped improve the revised manuscript. We have addressed all the comments point-by-point responses in the attached file:

 

With best regards,

Yours Sincerely,

Ming Li

mingxin@ustc.edu.cn

2022-04-20

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Authors have improved the manuscript addressing comments by reviewers. It is now ready for publication