Beyond the Tide: A Comprehensive Guide to Sea-Level-Rise Inundation Mapping Using FOSS4G

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This work explored a method to map sea level rise inundation. The functions of the toolbox was well introduced. An example at Virginia Key area was presented. In general, the ms was well orgnized and written. Here the tide gauge data plus SLR scenario value was used to demonstate the inundated area. It denotes the effects of  sea level at "points". If the model simulations (grids) was input to the toolbox, if may give more information about the inundation mapping. Hence, the limitions or the shortages of the toolbox could be disscussed. Or the advantages than other toolboxs could be mentioned.

Author Response

Thank you for reviewing our manuscript. We expanded the limitations section to highlight other grid-based input that could give more information about mapping based on your comment.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript does not present anything particularly innovative or special, but it is relatively well-written and organized. The work is on a local scale, representing a highly localized case study with limited scope, which could, however, be applied elsewhere. The title is overly grandiose and should be modified to immediately and more clearly convey that it is a work of local scale, and this should perhaps be better specified throughout the text and also in the keywords. With these adjustments, and the following suggestions, the manuscript could be considered for publication.

- lines 21-22: "A few feet of sea level rise may not sound harmful, but it becomes lethal when combined with king tides", did authors used ChatGPT for this manuscript? please, try to be more simple and scientific in terms of words.

- lines 116-117: A single statement is not enough for a head-section paragraph. Please, expand it. The same at lines 275-276. 

- Figure 1: both panels a and b are not original production from this paper? have authors the permission to reuse them?

- section 2.2: Despite the bathtub approach is commonly worldwide employed, a paragraph with limitations of the method must be added to the text (e.g., the land is moving as well, nonlinearly and spatial-differentially; sediment supply and erosion is not accounted; anthropogenic modifications of connectivity). Hence, chapter 3.4 should be moved here (no sense at the end of Results) and better elaborated.

- section 2.3.1: software employed in this study have already been introduced at the end of the Introduction. Thus, move acronyms there.

- section 2.3.2: is it necessary to built a separated sub-section just for this? i suggest to merge this paragraph with the previous section.

- line 267: "Vriginia"

- line 282: "and is considered adequate for local-scale modeling of inundation", by who? such a statement requires one or multiple references. Otherwise you must explain your assumption much more in detail.

- lines 287-304: Why datum conversion and TIN interpolation are introduced and explained here in Results instead of being in Methods?

- line 312: how can be assumed a so precise deterministic SLR value (0.44 m) without lower and upper confidence intervals? at least discuss about that.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The paper describes the use of a free software FOSS4G for coastal sea level inundation. After reading, I find that it is well written, the English is of excellent quality (although I do identify some minor errors e.g., line 109, highlight->highlights), and the structure is really good. More importantly, the case study and the appendix are surprisingly described in details, and I think it helps readers to implement case studies with this software. I would recommend it for publication, but I do have some small concerns, perhaps due to my ignorance,

(1), what’s the spatial resolution of DEM that is adequate, 10 m, or 1 m?

(2) in section 2, authors mentioned the datums reference system, and I think different datasets (or your input data) adopt various reference, do we need to reconcile them? If so, how it works in the software.

Author Response

We made several grammatical changes and fixed typos throughout the document, the one suggested by the reviewer included.

(1) Generally, LIDAR-based DEMs below 5m are used frequently in the literature. We now include a reference to a detailed discussion on DEMs, their spatial resolution and uncertainty in the context of SLR mapping.

(2) We now explicitly mention and reference the tool (gdal_translate) used for datum conversions.