Groundwater Characteristics’ Assessment for Productivity Planning in Al-Madinah Al-Munawarah Province, KSA

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

TThe study comprises the “Groundwater Characteristics Assessment for Productivity Plan-2 ning in Al-Madinah Al-Munawarah Province, KSA”. I read this manuscript and found that the authors have made significant efforts. I believe this manuscript can be useful for local authorities for water resources management in the region.

The authors studied the hydrogeochemical conditions of an aquifer in semi-arid conditions to evaluate the effects of groundwater extraction.

This manuscript could present a methodology for evaluating water for irrigation so that decision-makers can consider the study's results. In fact, the authors make no effort to give more details on the matter.

Inside the file you will find more details of the review.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Reviewer 1

All, the responses in the manuscript highlighted with Yellow color.

1. General comments: The study comprises the “Groundwater Characteristics Assessment for Productivity Planning in Al-Madinah Al-Munawarah Province, KSA”.

 

I read this manuscript and found that the authors have made significant efforts. I believe this manuscript can be useful for local authorities for water resources management in the region.

The authors studied the hydrogeochemical conditions of an aquifer in semi-arid conditions to evaluate the effects of groundwater extraction.

This manuscript could present a methodology for evaluating water for irrigation so that decision-makers can consider the study's results. In fact, the authors make no effort to give more details on the matter.

Response: The authors are greatly appreciating your critical observations as well as your constructive and helpful comments. We hope that we could address your questions/comments by the explanations and revisions made in the manuscript. We believe that the manuscript is substantially improved after making the suggested revisions.

 

2. Inside the file you will find more details of the review.

2.1 In page 8, should authors add This can also be caused by the precipitation of minerals in the pipes. For which it is recommended to estimate the precipitation rates of the main minerals.

Response:  Thanks for the Reviewer, the request has been added.

 

2.2 In Page 14, It is recommended to support the presence of fertilizers with evidence.

Response:  Thanks for the Reviewer, the evidence has been added.

 

2.3 In Page 17, The highlighted section should be deleted from the conclusion.

Response: Thanks for the Reviewer, the requested section has been removed from the conclusion.

 

 

 

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Review of the paper:

Groundwater Characteristics Assessment for Productivity Plan-2 ning in Al-Madinah Al-Munawarah Province, KSA

 

The paper deals with the groundwater resources appraisal within the Al-Madinah Al-Munawarah Provinces in Saudi Arabia. The main purpose of the work is to assess groundwater quality in these provinces as information for sustainable water resources management, for example for agriculture or other human uses. The work seems robust and relying a pretty solid data-based methodology. However, I am suggesting some minor adjustments before its publication within Hydrology. These are mostly related to the methodology Section or part of it. Moreover, some references are suggested to fill these gaps and will help the Authors in framing this task within the present literature. 

-        Figure 1, panel a: streams (at least major ones) should be named. I suggest overlapping the green networks to a Digital Elevation map.

-        Remove all the bold styles from the Methodology Section.

-        As a geo-statistician, the last itemized point at rows 216-218 is not acceptable. The outcomes it brings to the paper are the most important ones, and clarification about this part of the Methodology is mandatory. First, you need to explain if you employed Kriging Techniques for (i) estimation purposes or (ii) simulation purposes (you did go for the first strategy; see Deutsch and Journel, 1997); Second, specify that you repeated a Kriging-based method for each variable of interest; Third, which kind of kriging did you employ (ordinary, simple, universal…; see e.g. Thakur et al., 2017)? It seems you just employed one of these without a solid motivation; fourth, you should at least list your variables to be interpolated (let’s say water table, drawdown, and salinity) and underline which variogram structure do each kriging rely on (exponential, gaussian…), and possibly giving the best-estimated range of each variable’s structure leveraging your data. Then, you should go for assessing the opportunity, in further works, to employ a simulation perspective to have multiple kriged scenarios of each of your variables (see e.g. Schiavo, 2024), which is highly valuable in terms of giving a measure of uncertainty and sensitivity on your results to the reader. This aspect is very important to be mentioned in the Discussion part and in relation with both further works on this path and for this work’s application.

From my side, these points must be addressed, then the paper is solid and can be published. Best regards

References:

Deutsch, C.V., Journel, A.G., 1997. GSLIB: Geostatistical Software Library and User’s Guide. Oxford University Press, New York.

Schiavo, M., 2024. Numerical impact of variable volumes of Monte Carlo simulations of heterogeneous conductivity fields in groundwater flow models. J. Hydrol. (634), 131072, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2024.131072

Thakur, J.K., 2017. Hydrogeological modeling for improving groundwater monitoring network and strategies. Appl Water Sci 7, 3223–3240. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s13201-016-0469-1.

Author Response

Reviewer 2

All, the responses in the manuscript highlighted with Green color.

1. General comments: The study comprises the “Groundwater Characteristics Assessment for Productivity Planning in Al-Madinah Al-Munawarah Province, KSA”.

 

The paper deals with the groundwater resources appraisal within the Al-Madinah Al-Munawarah Provinces in Saudi Arabia. The main purpose of the work is to assess groundwater quality in these provinces as information for sustainable water resources management, for example for agriculture or other human uses. The work seems robust and relying a pretty solid data-based methodology. However, I am suggesting some minor adjustments before its publication within Hydrology. These are mostly related to the methodology Section or part of it. Moreover, some references are suggested to fill these gaps and will help the Authors in framing this task within the present literature.

Response: The authors are greatly appreciating your critical observations as well as your constructive and helpful comments. We hope that we could address your questions/comments by the explanations and revisions made in the manuscript. We believe that the manuscript is substantially improved after making the suggested revisions.

 

2. Figure 1, panel a: streams (at least major ones) should be named. I suggest overlapping the green networks to a Digital Elevation map.

Response: Thanks for the Reviewer, the major orders of the stream network have been ordered and named in the panel (a) as shown in Figure 1. (Page 3).

To overlap the green network on the Digital Elevation Model, it will be crowded and not readable.

3. Remove all the bold styles from the Methodology Section.

Response: Thanks for the Reviewer, all the bold styles have been removed from the methodology Section (Page 4-5).

 

4. -        As a geo-statistician, the last itemized point at rows 216-218 is not acceptable. The outcomes it brings to the paper are the most important ones, and clarification about this part of the Methodology is mandatory. First, you need to explain if you employed Kriging Techniques for (i) estimation purposes or (ii) simulation purposes (you did go for the first strategy; see Deutsch and Journel, 1997); Second, specify that you repeated a Kriging-based method for each variable of interest; Third, which kind of kriging did you employ (ordinary, simple, universal…; see e.g. Thakur et al., 2017)? It seems you just employed one of these without a solid motivation; fourth, you should at least list your variables to be interpolated (let’s say water table, drawdown, and salinity) and underline which variogram structure do each kriging rely on (exponential, gaussian…), and possibly giving the best-estimated range of each variable’s structure leveraging your data. Then, you should go for assessing the opportunity, in further works, to employ a simulation perspective to have multiple kriged scenarios of each of your variables (see e.g. Schiavo, 2024), which is highly valuable in terms of giving a measure of uncertainty and sensitivity on your results to the reader. This aspect is very important to be mentioned in the Discussion part and in relation with both further works on this path and for this work’s application.

Response: The authors are highly thankful for the Reviewer for his fruitful comments. Actually the authors applied many interpolation methods such as Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW), Kriging and Natural Neighbor Inverse Distance Weighted (NNIDW), which are included in GIS software, and the authors found that Kriging methods is the most appropriate which is more matching with the measured data.

Authors promise the Reviewer, in the next papers will include his fruitful comments.

 

All the requested references have been added in the manuscript and list of references (Page 5, Lines 218-220 and 782-787).

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx