Assessment of Urban Heat Islands and Land Cover Types in Relation to Vulnerable Populations

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Review of “Assessment of Urban Heat Islands and Land Cover Types in Relation to Vulnerable Populations” written by I-Shian Suen

General:

This paper assesses the relationship of UHI temperatures with landcover type and population characteristics (which are related to vulnerability)

Care should be taken by associating different social groupings as vulnerable. For example, just because population is non-white does not make then vulnerable, does it?

Overall, I found this paper interesting and informative. It is written well.  Apart from addressing comments below, it is suitable for publication.

Accept with minor modifications.

Specific:

Ln 104-5: Add a bit more how this was done.  In situ temperatures are 2 m air temps while satellite temps are surface temps.  Need a brief discussion of how these were combined.

Ln109, Ln 135-6, Ln 181: Mentioning use of ArcGIS Pro’s tools is fine, but still need to discuss what/how the stats were computed and what they mean.

Table 1: Do not understand how a constant can have Std. Error and t value? Would help to relate coefficients b(1-5) in (1) with values in Table 1.  Need to explain what ‘beta’, ‘t’, ‘Tolerance’ and ‘VIF” mean, along with ‘Collinearity Stats’ (as well as how computed).  What is ‘adjusted R² ’ and ‘F’ ?

Table 2: Could leave upper half of table numbers of as redundant.

Fig 5: Need to explain what (a) shows – not clear.  Also, some lines are very thin, hard to see.  What are standardized values?

Style

Need to change use of “I” to passive voice throughout document.  For example:

Ln56-7: Change “I intend to assess urban heat islands and land cover types in relation to vulnerable populations in the city of Richmond, Virginia.” to “Urban heat islands and land cover types are assessed in relation to vulnerable populations in the city of Richmond, Virginia.”

Author Response

Dear reviewer, I greatly appreciate your constructive comments and suggestions. My revised manuscript is not possible without your valuable input. It is my hope that I have adequately addressed your comments. Thank you very much for your review and consideration.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript presented is well written and enough well structured. Nevertheless, some parts have to be improved before going ahead. 

Firstly I suggest you to extend the introduction section. It is a little bit to short. In particular I advice you to consider to wriote something about UHI mapping using satellite data. I Know you adopt a differt way using ground data but most of studies adopt EO Data. Therefore, to remark the use of ground data in your method I suggest you to talk also about satellite data and a possible combined use...

Under this perspective I advice you to consider these works:

- https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2533110

- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2015.04.001

- https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0450(1969)008<0908:ANMOTU>2.0.CO;2

-  https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12213542

- https://doi.org/10.1007/s40572-017-0150-3

In figure 1 and whole the figure/maps if they are considered as maps and not as a simple image please provide the reference system, the nominal and representation scale.

 

In the materials and methods section plese provide all the software adopted you mentioned only ArcGIS but is it possible there to compute Moran'I p-value right? Please provide the exact tools and settings you use in the whole process in order to guarantee the scalability of the work

Please better describe how you got UHI and how you retreived the equation 1. 

The conclusion is a little bit too short I suggest to add something

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer, I greatly appreciate your constructive comments and suggestions. My revised manuscript is not possible without your valuable input. It is my hope that I have adequately addressed your comments. Thank you very much for your review and consideration.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx