Susceptibility Analysis of Land Subsidence along the Transmission Line in the Salt Lake Area Based on Remote Sensing Interpretation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear editor

I went through the paper and major revision is required as follows:

1- Research gap and novelty need more justification

2-  3- Results??

3- Please use the newer Model instead of ANN. Overall, the MS is fine, but ANN model is not new. Please use the new model, then, the paper can be accepted

 

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1:

We sincerely appreciate your careful reading and valuable comments to improve this manuscript. In view of your rigorous review of the article and the problems in the article, we have carried out serious thinking and solved all the problems raised by the reviewers. The responses to the reviewers ' opinions are as follows.

In addition, we have made some revisions to the manuscript, including combing the overall thinking structure of manuscript, correcting format errors, modifying English expressions, and correcting grammatical errors. All revisions are highlighted in red font.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors present a method to investigate, correlate and classify rate of land subsidence with power transmission tower deformation and instability. Certain concerns regarding the manuscript need to be addressed for reconsideration of the manuscript:

1. Certain design choices need better motivation, for example K-means clustering, over more advanced methods like mean-shift that do not require us to specify the number of clusters up-front ( we could learn new classes of land subsidence rate directly from the data that way ).

2. Recent related research in prominent publications like https://doi.org/10.1029/2018WR024185 have been left undiscussed. The authors should revisit the literature survey and make it more exhaustive, besides making sure not to simply cite existing works, but rather go into details of the theoretical frameworks involved in related published research.

3. Since interpretations like these are often presented to government or municipal agencies with limited imaging expertise, in the revised manuscript, it would be interesting to discuss the potential of visualizing the data using HDR imaging techniques like https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04375-9_17

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 2:

We sincerely appreciate your careful reading and valuable comments to improve this manuscript. In view of your rigorous review of the article and the problems in the article, we have carried out serious thinking and solved all the problems raised by the reviewers. The responses to the reviewers ' opinions are as follows.

In addition, we have made some revisions to the manuscript, including combing the overall thinking structure of manuscript, correcting format errors, modifying English expressions, and correcting grammatical errors. All revisions are highlighted in red font.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The aim of the manuscript titled “Susceptibility analysis of land subsidence along transmission lines in the Salt Lake area based on remote sensing interpretation” was to demonstrate application of SBAS InSAR technology to detect ground motions hazard along the UHV transmission lines in Salt Lake Playa of Qinghai Province, China.

My main remark is that the manuscript is tendentious. Salt deformation mechanism is shortly speaking dual, salt deposits behave various and are fragile to the humid conditions but authors didn’t mention about it. Sometimes they are uplifting sometimes collapsing. This are variations ,which are also visible on the time series (fig. 5). Another thing is that authors compared land subsidence with geomorphological feature as slope gradient. Slope gradient has no impact on the subsidence process. Subsidence is a vertical movement. Why authors compared subsidence with slopes. Even in the table (3) it is visible that there is no correlation. Authors adopted methodology, which is dedicated to landslides. In such a specific geographic conditions as described authors can find correlation between subsidence and hydrology, humidity also engineering loading but not slopes. Please fit research procedure to the scientific problem.

Another issue to be remarked is colloquial vocabulary. In whole manuscript authors use term “sensitivity” to describe [mm/yr]. There is no such a physical unit. Please note this is scientific paper. (otherwise you could also use terms: magnitude or amplitude). Please use the term “deformation rate” or another one “velocity”.

Authors described the test-site of about 10x10 km2 (what is nicely visible on the figures 3 or 6) but use GIS composition with very small scale to show the whole transmission line (figs. 3, 6, 7, 9 ). But they do not analyse that whole transmission line. Please rescale figures. They need bigger scale, nothing is visible here. Do not also understand what stars authors show in the figures (e.g. fig. 3b), they do not describe it in any caption. Please correct.

The manuscript must be reorganized. Methods and data must be clearly described in separate sections, not as e.g. 3.2. Authors mixed up methods and data.  Authors show methods after results e.g. sections 3.7.

I have big doubts about the manuscript because authors completely mixed up terms (in whole manuscript), they use interchangeably interpretation and processing, susceptibility and deformation rate (this ignorance is visible clearly in lines e.g. 167, 512) also: subsidence intensity, settlement intensity (e.g. line 385). Also authors use risk interchangeably with hazard (lines 406, 502 please note that risk mapping relates to financial assessment and authors do not do that).

Lack of consistency with other naming also: as deformation rate or mean deformation rate, etc….

Please reorganize the structure to be clear. Please correct English style.

 

Detailed remark:

 

Lines 148 – 149 and line 357 show different results. Please correct.

Lines 186 – 212 Please reorganize according to the main remarks.

Section 3.3 is mixed up and show data not inventory map, please clarify.

Line 214–219 – Please move to data section.

Lines 221 – Authors didn’t describe and  didn’t show any other damaged towers but only one in the figures 1 and 3. Please clarify.

Line 235 – Kriging is not presented as a method, please clarify. On the contrary in the caption of the figure 3e, it is written that authors used kriging to interpolate time series? Please clarify.

Both figs 3a and 3e are not clear, please improve the scale.

Fig. 4a –  It is not clear. This is subsidence velocity map, deformation map or kriging map? I do not think readers need North arrow for these pixels? I also see some uplift close the tower? How authors will explain that?

Fig 4b –  Please clarify what is sedimentation rate? Is that subsidence rate?

Lines 246 – 265 Please improve style or list it.

Line 301 – it is very bizarre sentence. I do not understand how lithology is geological disaster? Please clarify it.

Line 356 – SPSS Modeler, what is that? Please clarify.

Line 361 – Please improve style.

Line 367 – This is not clear, four levels of what? Please clarify. (authors wrote that susceptibility classified as 5 classes)

Table 4 is not clear, looks like [mm/yr] is susceptibility, please clarify

Fig. 9 is not clear. It looks as deformation rate and susceptibility are mixed up. Please clarify the issue.

Section 5.2 is not clear, please clarify.

Line 445 – Deformation maps were obtained using SBAS processing not using interpretation. Please correct.

Line 463 – mantagement – please correct.

Line 489 – Please correct style.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 3:

We sincerely appreciate your careful reading and valuable comments to improve this manuscript. In view of your rigorous review of the article and the problems in the article, we have carried out serious thinking and solved all the problems raised by the reviewers. The responses to the reviewers ' opinions are as follows.

In addition, we have made some revisions to the manuscript, including combing the overall thinking structure of manuscript, correcting format errors, modifying English expressions, and correcting grammatical errors. All revisions are highlighted in red font.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Editor

Authors addressed the comments and can be accepted in the present form. Just a note:

based on Remote Sensing Interpretation 

This section doenst need in the title, and can be deleted

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors seem to have made substantive revisions to their manuscript in accordance with the previous round of reviews and thus this new revised version may be accepted for publication.

Reviewer 3 Report

As I said before, the term "subsidence intensity" is misconception. Authors permanently write it and didn't change. Distance per time doesn't show an intense of the process. Mass must be taken into account to describe the intensity in this matter. The InSAR method is not standardized and this is the only gap why I can accept this manuscript.