Hydrological Simulation for Karst Mountain Areas: A Case Study of Central Guizhou Province
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper is well structured and meets the quality and standard of the Journal Water. The manuscript does not require modification except minor comment given below.
Minor comments:
Page 2, Lines 49: Provide reference to YMKE model.
Page 2, Lines 62: Provide reference to Soil Water Assessment Tool model.
Page 2, Lines 64: Provide reference to TOPMODELmodel.
Page 4, Lines 133: IXAJ or XAJ ?, elaborate the difference version.
All Figures and reference in the text: Reference to Figure 1, Figure 2 etc are given in the text as Fig. 1, Fig. 2 etc. Need to be consistent in labelling. Please follow the Journal guideline.
Author Response
Dear Editor and Reviewers,
Thank you for the letter and the comments on the submitted manuscript water-487295 entitled " Hydrological simulation for karst mountain areas: A case study of Central Guizhou Province ". We have thoroughly revised the English language and style based on the comments and suggestions from the editor and the reviewers, and we would like to resubmit this manuscript to water. Responses to each editor and reviewer are listed below.
Response to Reviewer 1 Comments:
1. Point 1: “Page 2, Lines 49: Provide reference to HYMKE model.”
Response 1: We modified on line 50 of the second page and provide the reference to HYMKE model.
2. Point 2: “Page 2, Lines 62: Provide reference to Soil Water Assessment Tool model.”
Response 2: We modified on line 62 of the second page and provide the reference to Soil Water Assessment Tool model.
3. Point 3: “Page 2, Lines 64: Provide reference to TOPMODEL model.”
Response 3: We modified on line 66 of the second page and provide the reference to TOPMODEL model.
4. Point 4: “Page 4, Lines 133: IXAJ or XAJ ?, elaborate the difference version”
Response 4: Page 4, Lines 143: The third section of the article describes the IXAJ. The XAJ model does not fully consider the role of the Karst funnel and is therefore not suitable for use in areas with developed groundwater such as the karst area. The IXAJ is an improved model based on the XAJ. Compared with the XAJ model, the IXAJ model has improved the groundwater module, and generalized of the underground karst fissures (such as dollines, grikes, and caves, etc.) by introducing a series-parallel reservoir, thereby achieving the purpose of improving the accuracy of runoff simulation. The 3.1 “Method of runoff generation” and 3.2 “Water source division” in the article are the same modules of IXAJ and XAJ, so it may cause ambiguity, which makes people mistakenly think that the third section describes the structure of XAJ. According to the reviewer's comments, we removed 3.1 and 3.2 and explained IXAJ and XAJ. Finally, the model structure of Xin'anjiang model is put in Appendix A.
5. Point 5: “All Figures and reference in the text: Reference to Figure 1, Figure 2 etc are given in the text as Fig. 1, Fig. 2 etc. Need to be consistent in labelling. Please follow the Journal guideline.”
Response 5: Thanks to the reviewer's reminder, we checked the full text and changed the corresponding place.
We hope our reply can well address your comments. Thank you again for your valuable comments and for providing us with very helpful references which helped improve this manuscript a lot.
Yours sincerely,
Yinmao Zhao
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
This paper may be interesting for publication in this journal but it has to be significantly improved. It is not clear what is the novelty i.e. scientific contribution in this field. The methods are not adequately described and the introduction doesn't provide the sufficient background.
My suggestion is to rewrite the paper.
Besides, there are many errors in writing references, they have to be correctly written (name instead the surname…).
Author Response
Dear Editor and Reviewers,
Thank you for the letter and the comments on the submitted manuscript water-487295 entitled " Hydrological simulation for karst mountain areas: A case study of Central Guizhou Province ". We have thoroughly revised the English language and style based on the comments and suggestions from the editor and the reviewers, and we would like to resubmit this manuscript to water. Responses to each editor and reviewer are listed below.
Response to Reviewer 2 Comments:
1. Point 1: “This paper may be interesting for publication in this journal but it has to be significantly improved. It is not clear what is the novelty i.e. scientific contribution in this field. The methods are not adequately described and the introduction doesn't provide the sufficient background. My suggestion is to rewrite the paper.”
Response 1: The main innovation of this paper is the improvement of the groundwater part of the original Xin'anjiang model. This paper has improved the groundwater based on the original Xin'anjiang model. The original Xin'anjiang model, i.e. the XAJ model, does not consider the influence of karst area funnels on runoff, so it is not suitable for runoff simulation in karst areas. In this paper, the introduction of a series-parallel linear reservoir to generalize the underground funnel, etc., increases the storage and regulation process of karst fissure water, and finally merges with surface water and groundwater into a total runoff. Based on the reviewer's comments, we removed 3.1 and 3.2 and highlighted the description of the improved modules and methods. In addition, we have also revised the introduction. Finally, the model structure of Xin'anjiang River is put in Appendix A.
2. Point 2: “Besides, there are many errors in writing references, they have to be correctly written (name instead the surname…).”
Response 2: We checked the references very carefully and corrected the errors found in time.
We hope our reply can well address your comments. Thank you again for your valuable comments and for providing us with very helpful references which helped improve this manuscript a lot.
Yours sincerely,
Yinmao Zhao
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
In this paper, daily runoff from six hydrological stations in Sancha River Basin (China) is simulated using the proposed IXAJ model. According to the authors, this model represents an improvement of the traditional Xin’anjiang model (XAJ) in terms of adding (1) a set of methods for simulating the production and confluence of karst areas and (2) multi-objective particle swarms parameter optimization procedure, which can be considered as a methodological novelty. However, this paper contains several conceptual and methodological flaws that must be explained and corrected. First, karst terminology used in this paper sounds very strange for me as a karst expert, which means that it must be improved by using terminology published in existing karst papers and literature, preferable from European and American authors. Second, the model structure of IXAJ model is explained extensively in chapter 3 where the contribution of this paper cannot be distinguished from the structure of XAJ. The structure of XAJ should be explained in an appendix, and this paper should be concentrated on explanation of differences between IXAJ and XAJ in presumptions, mathematical background (comments on new equations, replaced equations, newly added parameters, etc.) and results. In addition, the parameters obtained in calibration process of IXAJ were directly introduced to the XAJ model, which is incorrect. The parameters of XAJ should be obtained in a separate parameter optimisation procedure. Only in this way, the results and accuracy of IXAJ and XAJ can be objectively compared and the proposed improvement evaluated. However, even then, it should be noted that XAJ contain 12 parameters and IXAJ even 22. In my opinion, IXAJ is an over-parametrized model. This problem needs to be discussed in paper. The chapter 2 describing study area and data does not contain any information about available time series including periods of observations, basic statistics, graphical presentations, etc. Captions of figures and tables should contain more information including explanations of abbreviations.
Author Response
Dear Editor and Reviewers,
Thank you for the letter and the comments on the submitted manuscript water-487295 entitled " Hydrological simulation for karst mountain areas: A case study of Central Guizhou Province ". We have thoroughly revised the English language and style based on the comments and suggestions from the editor and the reviewers, and we would like to resubmit this manuscript to water. Responses to each editor and reviewer are listed below.
Response to Reviewer 3 Comments:
1. Point 1: “First, karst terminology used in this paper sounds very strange for me as a karst expert, which means that it must be improved by using terminology published in existing karst papers and literature, preferable from European and American authors.”
Response 1: According to the reviewer's opinions, we have read the relevant foreign literature and corrected the related terminology of karst in this paper (such as Page 1, Lines11, 14).
2. Point 2: “Second, the model structure of IXAJ model is explained extensively in chapter 3 where the contribution of this paper cannot be distinguished from the structure of XAJ. The structure of XAJ should be explained in an appendix, and this paper should be concentrated on explanation of differences between IXAJ and XAJ in presumptions, mathematical background (comments on new equations, replaced equations, newly added parameters, etc.) and results.”
Response 2: According to the reviewers' opinions, we deleted 3.1 and 3.2 in this paper, and explained the difference between IXAJ and XAJ in detail in the third part. Finally, the structure of the original Xin'anjiang model is put in Appendix A (line 544 on page 17).
3. Point 3: “In addition, the parameters obtained in calibration process of IXAJ were directly introduced to the XAJ model, which is incorrect. The parameters of XAJ should be obtained in a separate parameter optimisation procedure. Only in this way, the results and accuracy of IXAJ and XAJ can be objectively compared and the proposed improvement evaluated.”
Response 3: We re-verified the effect of the IXAJ model, that is, using the traditional Xinanjiang model with multi-objective particle swarms to parameterize and simulate runoff, rather than the parameters obtained in calibration process of IXAJ were directly introduced to the XAJ model. That is, the parameters of XAJ should be obtained in a separate parameter optimisation procedure. The results show that the simulation results obtained by re-calibrating the XAJ model are better than those obtained by directly bringing the optimal parameters of IXAJ into the XAJ simulation. We have also made changes in the corresponding locations, such as section 4.2 (line 305 on page 8) and line 104 on page 3.
4. Point 4: “However, even then, it should be noted that XAJ contain 12 parameters and IXAJ even 22. In my opinion, IXAJ is an over-parametrized model. This problem needs to be discussed in paper.”
Response 4: IXAJ model has 22 parameters, which may cause Curse of Dimensionality in scheduling optimization, and it is more difficult to optimize. Therefore, a stable and efficient particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to calibrate the model parameters. We explained it in line 287 on page 7.
5. Point 5: “The chapter 2 describing study area and data does not contain any information about available time series including periods of observations, basic statistics, graphical presentations, etc.”
Response 5: In Chapter 2 (Page 3, Lines 133 to 138), we added a description of the information about available time series including periods of observations, basic statistics, etc.
6. Point 6: “Captions of figures and tables should contain more information including explanations of abbreviations.”
Response 6: Fig. 2 (Page 6, Lines 229), 5 (Page 14, Lines 456), 7-9 (Page 15, Lines 463; Page 15, Lines 472; Page 16, Lines 491) and Table 2 (Page 8, Lines 302), 3 (Page 10, Lines 327) are explained in detail, including the explanations of abbreviations in Table 3.
We hope our reply can well address your comments. Thank you again for your valuable comments and for providing us with very helpful references which helped improve this manuscript a lot.
Yours sincerely,
Yinmao Zhao
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The references are not correctly written (name and surname are replaced---(for example: Denić-Jukić, V. instead of Vesna D.J. ).
The paper has been improved significantly.
Reviewer 3 Report
No comments
