Spatiotemporal Assessment of Air Quality and Heat Island Effect Due to Industrial Activities and Urbanization in Southern Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Introduction:

I would suggest to bring more recent studies in this areas and make a table for all of them as showing a table is much clear for readers.

In addition. The aim of the study isn’t clear and need to be re-written the paragraph and compare with previous studies and identify gap research.

2. Study Area

All figured must be improved and presented in high quality format and size.

3. Materials and Methods

This must be combined with the "2. Study area" section.

Too many Tables and Figures (some of them must be moved to the Supp Materials).

4. Results

Very weak statement without supporting them by previous studies. Please make sure cite the relevant studies and compare with your findings.

In the current form, it’s not interested to reader.

Too Many low quality figures and tables, all they have to be presented in very high quality. Please just keep the relevant figures and move the rest to the Supp Materials.

5. Conclusions:

Please re-write and change the structure to bulling points. You can write brief conclusion for each section of the results and discussion. Please add the gap study and remain research question in this filed. I would suggest write the shortcomings of this study and future work in this research area.

 

Author Response

please see the attachment 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

• The subject of the manuscript is to Evaluation of Air Pollution in Southern Suburbs of Riyadh. In my opinion, you've done a sufficient job to write this research paper. However, there are still some problems in your study.
• For abstract, I think you need to start the abstract with couple of lines about the importance of this study/why you did this work. In this version of paper, I think you have jumped directly to the materials you have tested.
• General comments for the introduction is the missing link between some paragraphs (needs to be more coherent). Also some paragraphs are very short, which may combine together.
• Improve the state of the art by including works such as: Cost-benefit analysis to support decarbonization scenario for 2030: A case study in Italy; DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2019.111137
• Improve the state of the art by including works such as:Mitigation strategies for reducing air pollution, DOI: 10.1007/s11356-020-08647-x

Author Response

please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper aims to evaluate the air and thermal pollution in the southern suburbs in Riyadh where people is suffering from air quality there, due to the rapid development of the industrial facilities in the area. The study distributed 405 questionnaires to the populations there, to explore their opinions about air pollution.

1. The Questionnaires study is a nice idea and in long term it would be great to include large number of people for the study. My major comment here is that authors state that the elements measured are lower than standard limits except for the element PM10, then how relevant is the evaluation of thermal pollution as it majorly generates the fine particles?? It would be great to study the chemical composition of PM10 and PM2.5, PM1 particles which could provide further insights. 
2. The authors mention that "The suburbs, Al-Iskan, Ad-Dar Al-Baida and the Second Industrial City residents in the southern side of Riyadh suffer from poor air quality, due to urbanization and industrialization which mostly affects their respiratory health" in the conclusion section. How they reached to such conclusion that Riyadh suffers from poor air quality due to urbanization and rapid industrialization while in the abstract section they wrote all elements except PM10 are lower than standard limits. This is huge contradictory statement based on no scientific judgement and without any quantitative values or data in the section.
3. In Figure 9, Why there is so much decrement in PM10 concentrations at Al Khaldiyah as compared to southern ring road station?
4. Another conclusive statement "The study area suffers from increased particle concentration in most places and exceeds the standard limit" without providing any quantitative data. Please provide the quantitative details here.
5. There are a lot of places where the spellings and English mistakes which needs to be addressed to improve the MS.
6. The figures are seemed to be plotted in Excel and the quality should be improved to match the journal standards, maybe the authors should use some innovative plotting tools for that.

Author Response

please see the attachemtn

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Some parts are not addressed properly. I would suggest to re-write the conclusion part.

 

Author Response

thank you for your comment

the conclusion was re-written