Evaluation of Global Precipitation Products over Wabi Shebelle River Basin, Ethiopia

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Accurate and high-resolution precipitation data is vital for data-sparse regions as for hydrological application and water resource management. However, the significance of this paper is questioned: (1) as the authors mentioned, there are several research in Ethiopia, why WSRB? Does new station or data or methods used in this paper compared to previous study? Most of the 27 ground stations used in paper are distributed in the north part of WSRB, only three stations in the middle and south parts. (2) The performance of downscaled data relies on the downscaling methods though high spatial resolution data is provided. BUT, the downscaling information is not detailed in the paper. What other information is used? if not, why it matters? (3) There is no significant difference between precipitation data and their relevant downscaled version (Table 3 & Table 4). In my view, the only important conclusion is that the global precipitation products perform poorly at daily scale in WSRB. And the paper is poorly written.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear  Reviewers,

We thank you very much for your constructive and valuable comments. We found them very helpful to improve the clarity of the presentation and the structure of the manuscript. We have gone through the entire manuscript editing, adding, and explaining in places with literature support to address your comments. Detailed point-by-point responses to the comments of both reviewers are shown below in red. The revised manuscript has addressed the comments and suggestions raised by the reviewers and we believe it is up to the standard.

The revision has been developed in consultation with all co-authors, and each author has given approval to the final form of this revision. The agreement form signed by each author remains valid.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Thanks a lot for authors's efforts. The revision is much better than the original version. Most of the comments are responsed quite well. I think the current version is OK for publication. However, the format should be improved, especially for references.

Author Response

Dear  Reviewers,

We thank you very much for your constructive and valuable comments. We found them very helpful to improve the clarity of the presentation and the structure of the manuscript. We have gone through the entire manuscript editing, adding, and explaining in places with literature support to address your comments. Detail point-by-point responses to the comments of both reviewers are shown below in red. The revised manuscript has addressed the comments and suggestions raised by the reviewers and we believe it is up to the standard.

The revision has been developed in consultation with all co-authors, and each author has given approval to the final form of this revision. The agreement form signed by each author remains valid.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

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

The paper titled “Evaluation of global precipitation product over Wabi Shebelle River Basin, Ethiopia”, presents a good topic for readers of this Journal. The topic represents an interesting line of research. However, the paper presents some severe lacks.

As the paper is presented, I do not see any methodological novelties. Therefore, I suggest resubmitting it as a technical note.

 

Introduction: The real lack of this manuscript is the absence of a deep and careful literature review. In my opinion, cited references for this topic are not sufficient to give robustness for your hypothesis. For example, you have to add more information on recent hydrological studies. In particular, to improve introduction, you could consider some recent studies (but not only these) on this topic:

 

Gioia, A.; Lioi, B.; Totaro, V.; Molfetta, M.G.; Apollonio, C.; Bisantino, T.; Iacobellis, V. Estimation of Peak Discharges under Different Rainfall Depth–Duration–Frequency Formulations. Hydrology 2021, 8, 150.

Grimaldi, S.; Nardi, F.; Piscopia, R.; Petroselli, A.; Apollonio, C. Continuous hydrologic modelling for design simulation in small and ungauged basins: A step forward and some tests for its practical use. J. Hydrol. 2021, 595, 125664.

10.3390/atmos10020043

10.2166/nh.2019.163

10.4081/jae.2015.432

Format: You have to take attention to page numbers and row numbers.

Format: You have to check equations and tables format.

Paragraph 3.1: Take attention “italics” format.

Line 71 (page 17 of the PDF file): You have to replace “Conclusion and recommendation” with “Conclusions”

Line 93 (page 18 of the PDF file): You have to replace “I believe” with “We believe”. In general, Moderate English changes are required.

Figures 5a and 8a: These are not a good quality figure. I suggest you to replace them, in particular take attention on x-axis and y-axis.

Conclusions: You have to highlight novelties of this study respect previous works.

Reviewer 2 Report

The envaluation work is a good way for data products, especially for the precipitation dataset, while the scientiifc contribution need to be improved much. Some potential improvments include data adaquitely scientific concern in the research region, the analysis is not enough to deduce the conclusion mentioned here in the last part. 

Reviewer 3 Report

This study evaluated five global precipitation products in Wabi She-belle River Basin, Ethiopia at different timescales. A number of evaluation indices were used for comparison with observed data. This work is useful for global precipitation products application at local scales. However, I recommend a rejection since there are many mistakes in the current version. The writing of the whole paper has serious problems in normative. I have to doubt the authors attitude to scientific writing.

 

Comments:

1. Abstract should be rewritten. There are a lot of abbreviations in the abstract. Proper abbreviations that appear for the first time should be given their full names. I'm curious that Ethiopia did not appear in the whole abstract, which was the study area. ARV2 is the same as ARC2?
2. I believe the structure of introduction should be adjusted since the current version is not clear and logical. A comprehensive summary of previous studies is necessary which inspired the presented work. DO NOT list a pile of references without any reasonable
3. What do the blue rectangles represent in Figure 1? What does Grid 1 mean?
4. Figure 2 are deformed and distorted. All the maps should be in a uniform projection and coordinates.
5. What is wrong with Table 1?
6. The results could be more detailed, and organized. Moreover, there is a weak consistency between results and conclusions. For example, “The evaluation indicates that the performance of global precipitation estimate is affected by different factor like topography, gauge density, spatio-temporal scale, types of satellite algorism etc.” But, topographical factors were not substantially evaluated in this study.
7. Additionally, I do not believe that final paragraph of the conclusion is the conclusion in this study. The conclusions of this study should focus on the accuracy of the global precipitation products.
8. Please check and correct the details of each figure and table. For example, some of the latitudes and longitudes are missing in Figure 1. The scale bar is missing in Figure 2. The format of the first row of Table 1 needs to be changed. And, I suggest that more information display each R2 of each product in scatter plots. In total, the readability of tables and figures should be improved significantly.