A Practical Method for High-Resolution Burned Area Monitoring Using Sentinel-2 and VIIRS
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
In this paper, the authors develop an automated process to detect, and map burned areas at a high spatial and temporal resolution, using Sentinel-2 and VIIRS. I found this paper to be very well written, and the work easy to follow. I think that it will make a valuable contribution to the science and practice of remote sensing of wildfires. I have just a few suggestions on grammatical content and formatting of the document.
Line 2 (abstract): Missing noun “The availability of high-resolution satellite imagery allows to produce…” Try “allows one to produce” or “allows production of”
Line 4: missing noun. “Moreover, high-resolution can be a computational….” Perhaps use “high-resolution data” or “high-resolution imagery”
Line 55: “most notably, the by use of…” remove “by”
Line 69: reword “methodology for a fast monitoring” Suggestions “…methodology for a faster monitoring..,” “...methodology to quickly monitor…”, “..methodology to rapidly process…”
Line 97: suggest removing “the” before Mediterranean.
Figure 1 (and all other figures): Figures should either be the same width as the text column, or centered on the text column if they are smaller. This might just be an issue with the formatting of the draft due to the line numbers, If so, then please ignore this
Figures 2, 6-11. Please add scale bars and north arrows to map figures
Line 229: change “rational” to “rationale”
Between Line 279-280: lines at the top of page 8 are skipped in line numbering. In this area, you mentioned Commission/Omission Errors and the Dice coefficient. I think that some brief explanation is warranted here. I am familiar with CE and OE, but am not familiar with Dice. Other readers may not be familiar with one or more metric, so a brief explanation outside of the equation is warranted.
Line 359: change “To get some insight we look” to “To get some insight, we looked”
Figures 7-11: reword. Suggestion: “Figure 7. Visual analysis of “Portugal 2” fire. See Figure 6 for panel descriptions.”
Lines 399-400: Can you look at the exact imagery that was used by CEMS here, to back up this claim on cloud cover? I am assuming that is what is referenced in Table 2? By looking at the source image directly, you should be able to definitely state whether cloud cover was a problem, rather than to guess or speculate.
Line 417: reword this sentence. This statement is self-evident, as that is what a discussion section is for
Lines 420-422: Perhaps add a sentence here or later in the discussion about the need for future research to include ground truthing measurements. I think that would be the logical next step from here, since fine resolution calibration data do not exist. A further step to consider in future work would be to make high resolution burn severity maps.
Line 432: change “automatized” to “automated”
Lines 486-488: very good point made about applicability to wildland-urban interface!
End of Document: Please remove the 2 blank pages (20 & 21)
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Major Comments:
This is an interesting paper that is well presented. However Figures 1, 3 and 4 are vague, not very informative and a little confusing. It is strongly recommended that the author’s put some time into revising these figures. Improving these figures will go a long way to better illustrating their Methods and should improve the overall quality of the work.
Minor Comments:
- Page 1, Lines 2-3: Poor grammar. Suggest revising sentence to read “The availability of high-resolution satellite data allows burned area maps to be produced with great detail.”
- Page 1, Line 22: Suggest revising “occurred in” to “performed over”.
- Page 1, Line 30: Revise the beginning of the sentence to read “Polar orbiting satellites”.
- Page 2, Line 47: Suggest revising “burned points” to “pixels”.
- Page 2, Line 55: Remove the word “by”.
- Page 5, Line 157: Calculated the median of what? Cloud cover fraction?
- Page 5, Line 160. What is “n”? Please define. Seems like it refers to number, so “n” should be italicized?
- Page 5, Line 161: “regardless of”
- Page 5, Line 166: Suggest replacing “combined together” with “stitched together”.
- Page 10, Line 367: Wording: “the agreement between the two maps is stronger THEREBY suggesting…”
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The work is interesting because it exploits the potential of python and GEE to perform very complex calculations. It would be necessary to combine in a single model builder all the scripts necessary to obtain a result quickly by limiting the intervention of the userAuthor Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
