A Socioeconomic Dataset of the Risk Associated with the 1% and 0.2% Return Period Stillwater Flood Elevation under Sea-Level Rise for the Northern Gulf of Mexico

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is interesting and can be published after addressing some minor issues.
Please use more updated references for reference 1.
Line 33 to 35 should be revised. In some aspects, it can be considered as direct costs.
Reference 5 should be updated.
The flow of figure 3 is not acceptable and is a bit hard to follow. Please revise it.

Author Response

Thank you for the careful review of this article. Your thoughts are very much appreciated.

References 1 & 5 were updated to reflect a more up-to-date report (see tracked changes in the first paragraph).  And the introductory sentences are rewritten (originally lines 26-36).

In addition, language and grammatical issues were addressed throughout. Tracked changes were used in the revised document.

Figure 3 (now Figure 4) was redesigned to follow the schematic of the paper.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This dataset describes the potential socioeconomic damages of coastal storm surge under multiple sea level rise scenarios across 15 counties in the Northern Gulf of Mexico. The study intersects the geographical extent and depth of modeled floods with building, population, infrastructure, and crop data to generate damage estimates. Estimates are produced for 5 SLR scenarios (Present-day, Low, Intermediate-Low, Intermediate-High, High) and storm surge floodplains corresponding to the 1% (100-year) and 0.2% (500-year) annual exceedance probability.

Overall, I find this dataset to be an original and useful contribution to the field of disaster impact assessment, particularly in a region which has historically experienced significant flood risks. The description of the data and methods appear appropriate but some attention should be paid to the Broader Impacts and Structure of the manuscript, as some elements of the processing remain unclear and it’s not immediately evident why the dataset is important. I would recommend addressing the comments below prior to publication, and have noted page and line numbers, where applicable.

 

Significant:

Broader Impacts:

• The authors provide relevant background for regional flood risks in the Summary section but fail to describe the importance of such a dataset, beyond saying that it aims to “…increase the understanding of the socio-economic impacts of SLR and to develop the spatial information needed by local planners to develop hazard mitigation and land-use plans” (Page 2, Lines 58-60).
  
  Do local planners currently utilize socioeconomic impact data in their hazard mitigations and land-use plans? If so, how does this dataset improve on the current state-of-the-art? If not, how will this aid their work? I suggest a statement on Broader Impacts in the introduction that would highlight the significance of this work.

Manuscript Structure:

• The structure of the manuscript is somewhat confusing in how it presents the dataset multiple times. In the Section 2 (Data Description) the authors note the dataset contains 29 shapefiles corresponding to “…seven different measures of storm surge inundation impacts” but then go on to list eight items:

1. 1. Buildings
   2. Building content
   3. Roads
   4. Bridges
   5. Vehicles
   6. Crops
   7. Essential Facilities
   8. Displacement of people

Section 2 goes on to describe the data in more detail but appears to include different categories (e.g. separating Essential Facilities and Wastewater Treatment Facilities) and only includes six subsections.

It would be helpful to clearly enumerate what the outputs are, perhaps in a separate table that corresponds to the actual shapefile names. This would also reduce the need to name the shapefiles in-text.

• Please provide a description of the hexagonal grid system earlier in Section 2 to help provide context for why this format is included. There is a mention in Section 3.2 (Data Processing and Workflow) that this grid system is “…to normalize data for better visualization of geospatial patterns” (Page 9, Line 332) and later in the Figure 4 caption it’s explained that grid sizes are 10 km² (Page 10, Page 345). Please explain how this size was selected and how it aids in the analysis / visualization of impacts (e.g. are damage “heatmaps” used/useful for planning purposes?).

 

Minor

• Page 1, Line 31 – Please clarify “tropical storms” vs. “hurricanes”
  
  
• Page 2, Line 49 – Should this say “1% and 0.2%?
  • Page 6, Line 195 – Same comment
    
    
• Page 2, Lines 56-57 - “Overall, SLR is expected to expand the storm surge floodplain into new regions and increase the depth of inundation in areas already in the present-day storm surge floodplain.”
  

This line is repeated from Page 1, Lines 41-44

• Page 2, Line 62 – I only count 28 shapefiles
  
  
• This isn’t a huge issue in my mind but some of the data types in the shapefiles are inconsistent:
  • Build_Inventory: Integers
  • Bld_Inv_Dam: Double

It may be worth converting these to a unified type if you feel that would impact subsequent analyses

• Page 5, Figure 3 – Caption needs to be more descriptive. Do the shapes/colors mean anything? Text is somewhat difficult to read.
  
  
• Page 5, Table 1 – Caption still has placeholder text
  • Please provide actual URL or DOI for data sources, where applicable.
    
    
• Page 6, Line 175 – What carbon emission scenario does Parris et al. follow? Is it tied to a particular RCP?
  • May be worth introducing the Parris study earlier because the Low/Intermediate-Low/Intermediate-High/High values are discussed in the section on Building Data and it’s not immediately clear where these designations are coming from.
    
    
• Page 7, Line 232 – Please provide brief description of SimplyAnalytics
  
  
• Page 9, Line 309 – Depending on what years you accessed the Cropland Data Layer this description of Landsat Sensors may not be accurate. The most recent CDL use data from Landsat 8 OLI/TIRS, ResourceSat-2 LISS-3, and Sentinel-2 sensors.
  
  See “Section 3: Cropland Data Layer (CDL) Information”, Question 2 here: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Research_and_Science/Cropland/sarsfaqs2.php
• Page 11, Line 372 – What is meant by “output theme”?
  
  
• Copyright
  • The paper itself includes a Creative Commons Attribution license but it would be helpful to include this information on the dataset DOI site as well: https://data.gulfresearchinitiative.org/data/HI.x801.000:0001

Author Response

Thank you for the careful review of this article. I appreciate your technical expertise in these subjects and your comments were instrumental in improving this article.

To address the “Broader Impact” comment, an additional paragraph was included (paragraphs 3 & 4 pg 1-2. These paragraphs present the national standards for assessing flood risk, the challenge of assessing risk in the future, and the state of SLR mitigation planning in the US.  

Further, the organization of “Data description” was shortened and a summary table was added as suggested.  (see table 1)

The description for the hexagon grid was brought up in the data description section (moved from Methods)

Minor comments all addressed:

• Figure 3 (now Figure 4) was redesigned as suggested by another reviewer and the figure caption was updated.
• Table 2 was updated to include data source links.
• SLR scenarios and their source were described in more detail and presented earlier in the manuscript.
• Mapping sources for Cropscape updated with newer sources
• Please clarify “tropical storms” vs. “hurricanes” (lines 28-29), tropical storms were switched to hurricanes. Hurricanes are tropical storms that meet particular criteria for sustained winds- all the listed storms met the criteria for the hurricane category.
• The creative license information is the metadata provided through the data link. https://data.gulfresearchinitiative.org/pelagos-symfony/data/HI.x801.000:0001/formatted-metadata
• In addition, language and grammatical issues were addressed throughout. Tracked changes were used in the revised document

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

.

The article presents an important theme. One of the challenges for coastal cities is flooding caused by combining extreme rainfall and rising sea levels. So I believe the subjective of this paper is relevant.

To be published I suggest: 

 

1 - Separate the methodology from the case study, which will allow the same methodology to be reapplied in other cases.

2  -I would like a little more detailed description of the HAZUS-MH software.

3 - Present the results. Make an evaluation of the methodology based on the results and point out which methodological changes would lead to significant changes in the results. Present a critique of the software and its application limits.

Author Response

• Although it is a bit challenging to completely separate the case study from the methods, some attempts were made to make the methodology more accessible and reproducible. For example input to data links were provided, most data used in this study is available for the entire US. The Stillwater floodplains is not a national dataset and other methods could be applied perhaps, suggested in the text was the use the HAZUS flood hazard module to simulate flood depths, further discussion may be beyond the intent of this paper.
• More details on HAZUS were added to section 3.1, cited studies which utilize HAZUS for flood risk assessment, future risk assessment, and use of HAZUS outside the US..
• A discussion section was added to address the limitation of the study. It is not the intent of this paper to discuss results as they are being prepared in a following publication and the Data Journal does not require them.
• In addition, language and grammatical issues were addressed throughout. Tracked changes were used in the revised document.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx