Slope Stability Analysis Method of Unsaturated Soil Slopes Considering Pore Gas Pressure Caused by Rainfall Infiltration
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The submitted manuscript addresses a topic of great technical and scientific interest, and takes an interesting approach to the process that triggers landslides. The results presented are based on a careful study by the authors and use modern resources of analysis. In the course of the review there are some points that deserve more detailing (marked in yellow in the attached manuscript and pointed out in some figures and tables) in order to make the manuscript more complete and more interesting to the reader. The conclusions deserve a critical analysis from the authors since many of the items are more analyses and discussions.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
The authors would like to appreciate your time and kind efforts to evaluate this research paper and acknowledge your valuable comments advising us of its shortcomings and inspiring us to enhance its quality. Detailed answers to your comments are provided below and the manuscript has been altered where necessary. The changes that have been made in the manuscript are colored in RED. We believe the following answers and the revised manuscript cover your points of concern appropriately.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
This paper proposed a new slope stability analysis method taking into account pore gas pressure by using a numerical method. The major changes required for this paper are as follow:
1. More detailed information should be provided on the FEM used in this study.
2. Please add some figures for principal parameters introduced within the paper (i.e., pore air and water pressure, degree of saturation, etc.) using shading and contour plots for different situations of the slope for initial conditions and during rainfall.
3. Page 15, Lines 381-385: Regarding “When calculating the safety factor… safer when evaluating slope stability.”, the difference between FS values of these two cases is very small. Is such a small difference of practical importance in slope stability analysis? This reviewer believes other types of soils should be analyzed by the authors to show the importance of using their method in engineering practice.
The following minor points and suggestions are provided to improve the quality of this paper.
1. The following sentences were repeated excessively. Please remove some.
“The residual thrust method is suitable for geotechnical slope analysis in case the sliding surface has an arbitrary shape. This method is used by many scholars.”
2. Page 7, Line 205: Please replace “soil content” with “water content”.
3. Page 7, Line 207: The notation used for pore gas pressure is not consistent with those used in Figure 3.
4. Page 9, Line 256: It seems that the phrase “main factors” is the better option compared to the words “main loads”.
5. Page 10, Line 299: It seems that the phrase “became faster” is the better option compared to the phrase “was fast”.
6. Page 11, Line 305: Regarding “As the air pressure rose to be much higher than the water pressure” noted by the authors, the rate of air pressure increase seems to be greater than the pore water pressure in Figure 7.
7. There is no explanation in the text for Figure 8. What is the x-coordinate of the point that this pore gas pressure profile belongs to? At which initial saturation?
8. The number “100” within the unit of saturation for the x-axis of Figure 9 is redundant.
9. Page 15, Lines 378-380: It would be greatly useful to present a figure to show the explanation noted in “As a result, the water pressure in the saturated surface zone … direction of the slope toe.”
Author Response
The authors would like to appreciate your time and kind efforts to evaluate this research paper and acknowledge your valuable comments advising us of its shortcomings and inspiring us to enhance its quality. Detailed answers to your comments are provided below and the manuscript has been altered where necessary. The changes that have been made in the manuscript are colored in RED. We believe the following answers and the revised manuscript cover your points of concern appropriately.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The revisions made by the authors are satisfactory.
