Interannual Hydroclimatic Variability of the Lake Mweru Basin, Zambia

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a very well written and clearly presented article examining trends in precipitation and lake level in a medium-sized watershed in Zambia. The authors explain the climatic context well, and I think the article is suitable for publication with some very minor revisions:

The study relates precipitation to lake level, over a 70-year period, but there is no description / discussion of catchment land use / land cover and population trends. Over this period, there may be significant trends in agricultural and/or per capita water use leading to changes in the catchment water balance (e.g. blue v. green water). While not suggesting that the authors need to expand the analysis, it would be good to explore (or discount) this possibility in the paper. I would have liked to have seen a more detailed description of the hydrology of the basin – particularly the floodplain wetlands of the Luapula River, and comments on the availability of any riverflow data. The conclusion should be shorter – and focus on the key findings of the study.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Interannual Hydroclimatic Variability of the Lake Mweru Basin, Zambia by Waylen et. al.

 

Waylen et al. investigated the interannual hydroclimatic variability of the lake Mweru Basin in Zambia. Analysis was done based on historical data. They have used noaa and ARC2 data for their study. Overall, I found the manuscript is well written (particularly results and discussion sections) and easy to follow. In my opinion, this paper should be published with some minor revision. I have some comments/suggestion that need to address before publication.

Here it follows a list of suggestions and observations the authors might want to consider:

First of all introduction section needs to be improved. In the Introduction section, the authors conducted a basic literature review on Mweru basin and some review on hydroclimatological study of the Congo. However, the authors failed to clarify the difference(s) between their study and the similar studies of other scholars, and justify the motivations of their study. The authors should point out: what are the drawbacks in the previous studies in the region, what is lacking and what is the novelty in this research?

Secondly, I suggest to add methods section, which makes easy to follow the manuscript.

Line 64: this sentence need reference.

Line 89-92: What kind of data is that? Is that observed data/ climate model data? / re-analysis data or other kind of data. If this is observed data, have you done homogeneity and normality test for your data. The homogeneity of data is important regarding the quality assurance and normality of the data is important for applying the parametric tests e.g. regression.

Line 94-95: It seems like you are doing Kriging to create grided data. Was the precipitation kriging a 2D or 3D kriging where elevation is the 3rd dimension ?

Line 98: Readers will be benefited to get more information (for eg. spatio-temporal resolution etc.) about this gridded datasets. And what you did with mentioned ‘R’ package?

Figure 1: Please provide coordinates on both axis in presented map.

Figure 3: While reading till figure 3, I am lost. I cant able to figure out how did you calculate Estimated annual precipitation input to the Mweru basin. The values you presented in figure, is that averages over the basin from your input (observed or model ??) data ? Please mention it clearly. Is there any specific reason to select +- one stander deviations?? is that standard deviations about the mean or what ? What is 142.1 mm?

Line 120: Which periods?

 

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf