Calibrated Integral Equation Model for Bare Soil Moisture Retrieval of Synthetic Aperture Radar: A Case Study in Linze County
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I finished reading the paper by Zhang et al, which attempted to retrieval soil moisture from SAR observarions.
The paper goes in depth with theoretical aspects of the soil moisture retrieval by using multi-angular or multi-frequency approaches and using experimental validation for the proposed methodology, which is certainly original and the subject is interesting. However, I see two major problems that hamper publication:
- As first, any attempt of framing the paper into the state of the art is missing. This should be addressed in the introduction, which instead contains a very poor overview. To help place the findings into a broader international context (in the Introduction section) can the authors provide an objective-focused tabular literature review of relevant research: including the current study as the last row in this proposed table. Doing this should make it more apparent to readers (and reviewers) what the new contribution of this study.
For examples of objective-focused tabular literature reviews, please see Table 1 of the following papers.
Jarihani, A.A., et al (2015) Where does all the water go? Partitioning water transmission losses in a data-sparse, multi-channel and low-gradient dryland river system using modelling and remote sensing. Journal of Hydrology. 529(3), 1511-1529, doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2015.08.030
- This paper failed to check the feasibility (at least technically) of the proposed retrieval based on the angular- and frequency-dependence for satellites. The paper has focused on the experiment over certain land cover class, which I found surprising. Could the approach be easily applied to other soil moisture profiles?
Minor
The quality of the figures is bad
The English has to be improved
Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
See my comments in the pdf file
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
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Reviewer 3 Report
The proposed study analyzes the potential of the calibrated IEM model for estimating the water content of the soil. Despite the value of this type of approach for estimating soil moisture, the article requires serious improvements before acceptance to a publication.
1) The article certainly needs professional reading to improve English.
2) The article needs a richer introduction with more information on the state of the art of water content estimation using radar remote sensing.
3) The description of the databases requires more details (moisture, roughness, etc.).
4) It is needed to specify more clearly the contribution of this study compared to the many scientific studies on soil moisture?
5) There is no interest of frequency analysis of empirical parameters when the data is limited to a single frequency?
6) The article uses ENVISAT data, why not use a newer satellite database, especially with Sentinel-1 data, In fact, the satellite data seems limited.
7) The moisture map in Figure 5 lacks details, which area, geographic coordinates, interpretation of spatial variations?
8) What about vegetation cover effect on radar signal?
9) Equations 2, 3, 4 correspond to which polarization?
10) Introduction needs surely more new references, particularly using Sentinel-1 data (https://doi.org/10.3390/s17112617, https://doi.org/10.3390/s17091966, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11202451 etc....)
Author Response
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Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
I have no more comments.
Author Response
Thank you!
Reviewer 2 Report
the paper has been improved a little but it still lacks the right rigor. In addition, the correction of English is necessary (I suggest for example AJE services). In fact, english is of very poor quality. If I have to revise this paper again I would like to point out to the authors that at the first badly written sentence I will reject the paper because it is the 2nd time that I have pointed it out!Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
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Round 3
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Colleagues,
Here are my comments/suggestions in the word file. In my opinion there is no more technical problem on the other hand the structure of the sentences is very bad. In my opinion, it is necessary to review again the English (the style is not good)
Best regards
Comments for author File: Comments.docx
Author Response
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