The Effect of Papyrus Wetlands on Flow Regulation in a Tropical River Catchment

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Nice manuscript written in a good English presenting results of hydrological model study of an important problem related to land use change and hydrological hazards (droughts and floods)

There are just few issues that should be clarified:

Line 262-263 – please describe what land used/cover is implemented in the model instead of wetlands! Please describe, how do you deal with periodic (at least twice a year) inundation of the wetlands when swapping the land use? 

Line 320-332 – please give the threshold value for the low-flow and flood conditions. It is not clear if the threshold were calculated for each scenario individually or only for the baseline scenario. The selection of on or another option should be justified. 

Line 533 –what do you mean by ‘hydrological footprint of the catchment’? please explain.

Line 535-536 – I suggest that you just go on and name the associated risks in this sentence, and thus saving space later in the paragraph.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 

This modeling case study evaluated the role of wetland in regulating river flows considering future climate change. The manuscript is well written with appropriate references. See general comments below.

 

1.      Mention this is a modeling study in the abstract.

2.      Table 1. Are 3 digits after the decimal point warranted here?

3.      If you are using the model to predict daily hydrologic metrics (e.g., flood duration and frequency), you should report the daily calibration/validation results.

4.      What is the size of the model grid (x,y,z) and total number of cells? At what timestep is the model run?

5.      Figure 6. These are calendar years not water years. A water year refers to October – September.

 

6.      Given the substantial uncertainty associated with climate change and climate models, the use of a single model seems very problematic. Some models will predict more rain while others may predict less. This study would be much better if you could report a range of future conditions based on the different climate models. I understand it is probably too late to consider this, but the single model for the future is a major weakness. More in-depth discussion of this is probably warranted.

 

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

I noticed a few misspelled words. Please double check for spelling mistakes.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Review on ‘The Effect of papyrus wetlands on flow regulation in tropical river catchments’ by Oyarmoi et al.

 

The manuscript discussed the use of hydrological modelling for assessing flow regulation in Uganda for historical and future climate projection. Although have some merits, revision is required to improve the readability of the manuscript.

 

1.       Title does not represent the content as only one catchment used for study case

2.       The introduction is written well, which provides general overview of the important the wetlands, but I miss how this connect to the study site being discussed. Does a single catchment able to represent the wetlands in tropical rivers?

3.       SHETRAN suddenly appears in L83, why? And what is the pro and cons of this model compared to others?

4.       Methods:

a.       What is the spatial resolution for running SHETRAN and what are the timescale of the model are missing in the text. The river-flow is daily I think, whereas CMIP6 is monthly? In section Results and Discussion, it was mentioned at daily for calibration.

b.       In L301, the model is set to 100Km for future scenario, how many grids for the whole catchment are? What about for calibration?

c.       L233it was mentioned 35 years for calibration and validation, but the observed data is only for 17 years (L171).

5.       Why the model missed the peak discharge? although it was analysed in monthly basis.

6.       I think the cited literatures is too much as it not for a review paper, please keep it below 50 cited papers.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc