Water Harvesting in the Garmian Region (Kurdistan, Iraq) Using GIS and Remote Sensing

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

This manuscript is a revised and resubmitted one. The authors have done what was requested in the previous review and it is acceptable in my opinion.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

The authors have revised the manuscript as requested. The paper can be accepted for publication in its current form.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

The manuscript titled “Water Harvesting in the Garmian Region (Kurdistan, Iraq) Using GIS and Remote Sensing” presents an interesting study and should be published after minor revision.

 - Lines 43-47. Writing about the advantages and possibilities of using water harvesting systems, it would be worth citing more studies confirming those statements. For an example, You can see the following works:

Musz-Pomorska, A.; Widomski, M.K.; Gołębiowska, J. Financial Sustainability of Selected Rain Water Harvesting Systems for Single-Family House under Conditions of Eastern Poland. Sustainability 2020, 12, 4853. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12124853

Oviedo-Ocaña, A.R.; Dominguez, I.; Ward, S.; Rivera-Sanchez, M.L.; Zaraza-Peña, J.M. Financial feasibility of end-user designed rainwater harvesting and greywater reuse systems for high water use households. Environ. Sci. Pollut. Res. 2018, 25, 19200–19216.

 

- Symbols from the formulas in the text should be written in italics.

- Caption to table 11 - Use a capital letter at the beginning of the sentence. In the caption of tables 1, 2,8-13 and figures 13-21, there should be a dot instead of a colon.

- Please format the text as required by Water journal: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/water/instructions.

After the titles of tables, chapters, captions to figures, please do not put dots.

- Why are some parts of the text highlighted in color?

Author Response

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Reviewer 4 Report (New Reviewer)

This paper provides a comprehensive approach for determining rainwater harvesting areas with an application in the Garmian region of Iraq. This could be significant in the development of using new approaches an multiple sources of data to make this determination. However, I have some serious concerns related to the data and approach (see below) and the paper does not appear to be edited. I do not have any issues with the technical approach of the study. I would encourage the authors to address these concerns and possibly resubmit.

·      Line 161: Only two precipitation stations are used in the spatial analyst using inverse distance weighted for the entire country. The authors should discuss any limitations this might incur on the study.

·      Line 205: The determination of RWH suitability based on Soil Texture is using the ability of water retention. However, this does not account for the ability of “infiltration.” For instance, clays may have high water retention, but low infiltration which will make those areas challenging to use for RWH.

·      Figure 12: The potential RWH areas primarily follow the rainfall amounts. This reflects the high weight on rainfall in the algorithm. The authors should comment on the limitation of this study based on my earlier comment on two precipitation stations. Or, find a precipitation data set with higher resolution.

·      The paper needs to be edited properly for grammar.

Author Response

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Reviewer 5 Report (New Reviewer)

This study focuses on selecting potential sites for rainwater harvesting in the Garmian region of Kurdistan-Iraq, using GIS and RS techniques. I think the research is interesting, since no relevant studies were carried out in previous studies in Garmian based on the authors’ statement. However, I don’t understand the newly proposed method  in this study due to their unclear descriptions in Methods sections. In addition, there are also many other problems should be solved. My main comments are as follows. 

I suggest authors to add more descriptions about how previous studies determine the locations of RWH using GIS and RS in Introduction sections, rather than repeatedly describing the importance of using GIS and RS to locate RWH locations. Readers care more about what previous research has done and what is the progress of this study based on previous studies.

L93-96. You should give reasons why a new rainfall classification method was added in this study, since you abandon the previous methods according to your description (e.g., the minimum and maximum local rainfall values). Is this new method the novelty of this study? If so, maybe your introduction section should be re-organized because you should state the shortages of previously used methods and the advantages for using the method proposed by this study to locate RWH locations. If not, you should clear the novelty of this study. For example, there is no surface RWH study in the Garmian region or the proposed method.

L129-130. Please provide a detailed description about how the missing data were filled.

L152-154. If only precipitation data at two precipitation stations were used in this study, how the accuracy of precipitation estimates in different spatial locations can be ensured. Maybe satellite precipitation dataset with a better spatial representation is a better selection.

L163. I don’t think IDW is a good selection since only two precipitation stations are used in this study.

L229-235. I still cannot understand how the weights were assigned. Can you give specific steps.

Maybe results and discussion should be separated.

Too many figures. Maybe some of them can be merged into one figure such as figures 13-17. There are also too many tables.

L472-475. Maybe unnecessary.

L480-482. Maybe the description is not appropriate.

L484-486. Please add the relevant descriptions about the newly proposed method in methods sections or change your description. I do not notice the relevant descriptions in methods section.

L478-491. I suggest remove these descriptions since they are not conclusions of this study.

Author Response

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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

This manuscript has interesting data on rainwater harvesting in an arid region that can be useful for local people and water authorities. The manuscript is well written, has a good structure and appropriate methods are used in it. However, there are some issues that should be addressed to make the manuscript acceptable. These are annotated on the attached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The paper studies Water Harvesting in the Garmian Region Using GIS and RS. Overall, the paper is written well, however, a few comments should be considered before accepting the paper for publication.

1. Introduction language should be improved to be written in a scientific way.

2. The novelty of the paper should be highlighted better in the last paragraph of the introduction.

3. Figures 2 and 3 are not important. It could be removed and report the data in the text.

4. line 155: the citation format should be as follow [4,15]. Please follow it for all references.

5. The section on results and discussion should be improved. I believe that some sections from the methodology part could be moved to the section of results.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

Comments on MS 2039093 by S.F. Aziz et al.

 This MS applies a series of methods available from the literature to compute a water harvesting potential in the Garmin region of Iraq, based on combination of several maps available from remote sensing, rain gauges and from international databases.

 Water harvesting could be a significant way of improving water availability in arid areas, such as Iraq and studies on water harversting are of interest for the international reader of the journal.

However, the present study lacks several informations that limit its interest in its present form.

 The main weaknesses are

- the authors do not present the water harvesting techniques planned in their region, yet the harvesting potential could be extremely different if individual harvesting from roofs or collective harvesting from ponds or from artificial infiltration is considered. Similarly the criterion used for characterizing water harvesting suitability should be presented and discussed and I cannot find it in the MS. This criterion is probably discussed in the references but, as a paper is supposed to stand by itself, it should be presented and discussed in the MS, either in the introduction or in the methods section.

 - the primary source of water is rainfall. However rainfall data rely only on two raingauges and the resulting rainfall map is derived from spatial interpolation resulting in a very smooth rainfall map. The authors must discuss more extensively rainfall at the scale of the whole Iraq region to support their spatial interpolation method. Generally the most significant driver of rainfall variations is topography, but other drivers could be obtained from general climate discussion. Such a discussion is lacking and should be introduced in the MS before publication could be considered.

 - the same observation is also valid for the soil map. Soil maps from global databases could be insufficient at the small scale of the study area. Validity of this map should be discussed based on local data including geological data.

 - superficial rainfall harvesting in ponds is strongly limited by evaporation, especially in arid area. Depending on the considered harvesting method, a temperature map should be included as a primary information.

 - finally, I do not understand why the study only considers a so limited area. Inscreasing the area of interest would allow more significant discussion of the the validity of original data.

 

For all these raison, the MS should be seriously reworked before publication could be considered. Based on the policy of the journal, this could correspond to a major revision or to a rejection of the MS with an advice to submit again.

 

Minor remarks are listed below

- abbreviation cannot be used in the abstract before being defined, except for general knowledge abbreviations such as GIS.

- are there some threshold effects in water harvesting potential? In this case, linear modelling should be avoided (or thresholded variables should be used)

- Fig. 1 is unsatisfactory : some variables such as topography or mean annual rainfall could be presented here.

- Fig. 3 the location of the two raingauges should be indicated in Fig. 1. Using only two raingauges with such a large difference may produce a defective rainfall map. Raingauges outside the area of interest could be used to define rainfall trends at a larger scale.

- Fig.5 : this is a very detailed map : are there some difficulties in comparing detailed and coarse maps ?

- Fig. 7 : this figure should be extensively discussed in order to establish its validity. I could not understand the legend

- Fig. 8 : what is the unit of drainage density ?

It seems that sections 2.2.3 and 2.2.4 belong to the Results section.

 It should be noted that I am not familiar with the method used in this study (WLC, AHP and MCA) so that I cannot comment the details of the computations.

Author Response

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