Scour Hole Development in Natural Cohesive Bed Sediment around Cylinder-Shaped Piers Subjected to Varying Sequential Flow Events
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Please note the detailed comments in the uploaded file.
Excuse, if comments do not sound diplomatic and cautious - they are anyhow meant as friendly suggestions by a colleague.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
WATER Manuscript ID 1433156
Authors: Badal Mahalder, John Schwartz, Angelica Palomino, and Jon Zirkle
Title: Scour hole development in natural cohesive bed sediment around cylinder-shaped piers subjected to varying sequential flow events.
Comments from Reviewer 1
We thank the reviewer for comments and suggestions. Responses to each comment/suggestion are made in the following section. The detailed response on the other comments and edits made in the manuscript are presented in the following sections.
Comment One
13/14 Please mention already in the abstract that both a) consideration of cohesive sediments and b) sequential flow events are characteristics that value your contribution and differ it from previous studies.
Response: The abstract was edited to address the comment above with in the first two sentences. It reads now as: “Scour evolution and propagation around a cylinder in natural cohesive sediment was uniquely investigated under multi-flow event varying sequentially by velocity magnitudes. This flume study differs from others that only used test sediment with commercially available clays for single flow.”
Comment Two
18/23/27… Avoid the keyword “soil” as the experiments were carried out in sediments, not soil (which might have numerous additional characteristics not considered so far).
Response: The keyword has been changed to “cohesive sediments”. Please check Line#27.
Comment Three
34 Limiting the reference on previous studies on a guideline by US FWHA is rather poor (cf. also next comment).
Response: More references have been added in the text. Please see the following responses.
Comment Four
48 Reference to more recent studies on scour development, - equilibrium and duration of formation do not consider recent publications and knowledge gained during the last 20 years (considering dates of publications given as reference).
Response: The authors thank the reviewer for those references. More recent literature has been added. Line #39 and Line#70, where some of the studies on non-cohesive soil have been added.
Comment Five
54 What is the meaning of “time of scour”? Duration of steady flow conditions?
Response: We were trying to say “time required for equilibrium scour”. Please see Line#54.
Comment Six
69 If (natural) soil properties cannot be simulated, avoid using the term soil (cf. above). Note that soils are rarely more than 1-2 m thick (on the most times dry floodplain) and significant less in form of subhydric soils at the surface of the river channel bed.
Response: The term has been changed to “Sediment”.
Comment Six
108ff The following text might require a rather fundamental change considering more recent
Response: The authors thank the reviewer for those references. Those references have been studied thoroughly, however, they did not compare the equilibrium scour depths both for cohesive and non-cohesive sediments. However, some of those has been referred in the text.
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Author
I have done a reading and checked its parts.
you should check the following comments
2. Review: Riverbed scour depth equations for bridge piers in cohesive soils
This section should be integrated into the introduction section as a subsection in any case.
3. Experimental Set-up and Procedures
This section could be more appropriately referred to as Materials and Methods.
The methodology is well explained and the materials well developed.
This section presents the development of the experiment as well as the parameters used. All of this seems correct to me.
It should be checked and ordered.
I recommend the publication of this manuscript once the corrections already described have been made.
I am not a native English speaker so I cannot comment on the quality of the English language used.
Best regards
Author Response
WATER Manuscript ID 1433156
Authors: Badal Mahalder, John Schwartz, Angelica Palomino, and Jon Zirkle
Title: Scour hole development in natural cohesive bed sediment around cylinder-shaped piers subjected to varying sequential flow events.
Comments from Reviewer 2
We thank the reviewer for the encouraging comments and the suggestions. Responses to each comment/suggestion are below:
Comment One
- Review: Riverbed scour depth equations for bridge piers incohesive soils. This section should be integrated into the introduction section as a subsection in any case.
Response: We thank the reviewer for raising this issue. However, the authors thought that adding the section in the “Introduction” would compromise the flow of the writing. Therefore, we kept it as a different section.
Comment Two
- Experimental Set-up and Procedures
This section could be more appropriately referred to as Materials and Methods.
Response: We thank the reviewer for the comment. We kept the title of this section as “Experimental Set-up and Procedure” since it was an experimental study (which can also be replaced with Materials and Methods in other form of article). However, if the Respected Reviewer insist, we can change it accordingly.
