Assessing the Microclimate Effects and Irrigation Water Requirements of Mesic, Oasis, and Xeric Landscapes
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Microclimate Effects and Irrigation Water Requirement of Mesic, Oasis, and Xeric Landscapes
Interesting manuscript. I check the similarity scores of the manuscript and found out it less than 20%. Therefore, we can move on with the manuscript.
I checked my previous comments and I believe the authors have addressed the issues which I highlighted. Therefore, I will be good to move on this paper.
However, there are some other issues raised by the other reviewers and they are critical. I have glanced them and I believe these comments should be looked by the raised reviewers for more clarity.
Other than that, I'm good with this paper.
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors can improve the answers of the comments and be more analytical and specific. The manuscript can be improved .
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
To the authors,
the study is very interesting and relevant but needs further improvement before resubmission.
There are several major points:
1. Wind considerations. the results will of course differ in the three areas: the direction is significantly different with respect to the buildings' structure. Thus, any result/consideration about it is not applicable.
2. Model setup. How far is the airport site? Is it realistic to use it as initial/boundary conditions? Consider the differences you have already in your domain in the quantities. Provide references for the vegetation parameters you used in modeling ET. Do the soil parameters in your model correspond to the actual ones? The physical limitations of the ENVI-met parameterizations regarding vegetation are not mentioned anywhere in the text to put in context the results. Does the model have adaptive root-depth and plant respiration limited by the conditions? Is the LAI adapted depending on the climate? Address the problem of close-by domain boundary in your settings.
3. Validation. Fig.3 does not seem to be visually what Tab.2 reports: visually the xeric results seem better than the other two. How is the grid-pixel for the validation chosen? How is the station placement w.r.t. the nearby vegetation (e.g. consider wind).
4. Determining the microclimate effects. Why do you choose 10 random gridpoints? what is the science behind it? why not average over the same-vegetation type pixel that is far enough from the edges between the different ones. There is no spatial standard deviation in the averaging, please provide it in every plot.
5. Introduction. Please address all points marked in the attached PDF. Highlighted the parts where citations are needed.
6. Spatial plots: use the same colorbar levels for the three subplots! use a fixed spacing, e.g. 0.5 K for the temperature.
7. Irrigation. the differences in ET between mesic and xeric are negligible! Report also here the integrated ET/irrigation value. Can you compare Both of them with values from the literature? do they fit?
Minor comments:
- Fig.2 misses both y-axes labels.
- Fig. 1 misses the airport station location used as initial/boundary conditions
- it is not clear where the validation stations are.
- Is realistic to have stomata resistance set to zero at sunset?
- Sec 3.1 misses all the citations needed.
- l.109: urban form?
- l.356-357. Does this include the root level for irrigation calculation?
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Microclimate Effects and Irrigation Water Requirement of Mesic, Oasis, and Xeric Landscapes
This is an interesting case study based research on the investigation of impact of microclimates and irrigational water requirements of arid regions in Phoenix, AZ. However, I have few queries before it is tested for a decision from Hydrology.
Abstract
“The microclimate effect encompassed surface temperature, 17 air temperature, and wind speed” – Why not Relative Humidity?
“The three landscapes include mesic, oasis, and xeric.”? What is the necessity of including this sentence in abstract?
“ The simulation was conducted using ENVI-met software for the hottest day of the year (23rd June 2011).” – What is the simulation? The text is not comprehensive.
What is the need for this research? I think, it is missing in the abstract.
- Introduction
“This study builds on two modeling studies by Middel et al. (2014, 2015) to investigate the microclimate effects and potential irrigation water requirements of high and low water use landscapes in arid Phoenix, Arizona [10], [24]. To simulate the ground conditions, this study employed ENVI-met version 4.4, which allows modeling trees in 3D as opposed to 2D in version 3.5 used by Middel et al., 2014 [24].”
Again the same question, why do you want others to read this paper? What is the need for such research?
More recent literature is required.
- Study Area
You can bring the figure underneath this?
- Methodology
What is this model? What are the capabilities of ENVI-met software? What are the governing theories of this software?
Table 1. Trees, shrubs, and vines in the study area modeled using 2D plants in ENVI-met 3.5. – Why do you want to have this in the paper rather in an appendix?
Results and discussion
There is no new findings from the research work. How do you generalize the findings from your research to the world? Your case studies were very short and not generic.
Conclusions
What do you add to the literate? Are there any related previous work? How do you compare yours to them?
Turnitin scores - Around 14% and I'm happy about it.
Overall - The authors were unable to showcase the importance of such research and they have not presented the take home message from their research to the generic world.
Author Response
Please see attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The manuscript presents a study of the microclimatic conditions and the irrigation water requirements of three different landscapes: mesic, oasis, and xeric landscapes, characterized by different tree and bush species and turfgrass extensions in Phoenix, AZ. The authors employed a commercial software (ENVI-met 4.4.1) to simulate the microclimate conditions of the three landscapes in the hottest day of 2011 in this arid region. The model output was compared among landscapes and with in-situ temperature measurements at 2 m height at one point in each of the three landscapes for the same simulated day. The wind speed and landscape water requirements and gross irrigation requirements result were also analyzed and discussed in the three locations.
The manuscript is interesting since it addresses a practical question such as selecting the landscape that has better microclimate effects for the lesser irrigation water amount. It also provides an example of the software application, initially developed for temperate climatic conditions, to modelling in extreme desert climate conditions.
Here I have gathered some observations and considerations to the manuscript:
The abstract mentions the three landscapes studied. Including a brief description of the three landscapes in the abstract (line 18) will help to make the experiment clearer from the initial reading.
Line 27: Overall, the oasis landscape proved to be the most efficient of the three landscapes for water consumption and day-time cooling.
It is not clear from the abstract text which is the efficiency definition in this statement. If it means that the oasis landscape achieves more day-time cooling for the amount of water consumed, expressing a ratio of temperature increment over ET increment could help assess this efficiency quantitatively.
Line 35: … and the introduction of synthetic turf grass as a heat mitigation strategy [1]. Reference [1] does not mention synthetic turfgrass as a heat mitigation strategy. In fact, synthetic turfgrass has the opposite effect. Please, revise and reword this statement.
The text refers to irrigation efficiency (lines 63, 182 and 184, section 3.5 ) this efficiency is irrigation application efficiency? If it is, please specify because it is difficult to understand otherwise.
In Table 1, all scientific names of the species should be formatted to italics. Maybe formatting the table in a more compact layout may improve its readability.
Label axes of Figure 2 are missing.
Axes scales of figure 4 are not equal nor are the legends intervals, this makes it difficult to compare the results obtained in the three landscapes.
Line 335: “The potential irrigation water depths were determined using the irrigation depths.” Maybe this explanation could be rephrased for better comprehension.
Figure 6(b) in line 338 is probably figure 7(b). Please check.
In lines 409-410, “a 0.1 m/sec reduction in the depth of irrigation.” Please check units.
In the discussion and conclusions section, the differences in wind speed and surfaces temperature between landscapes are discussed in terms of tree density and height, but nothing is said about the wind direction used in the modelling, or even if the software includes wind direction among the forcing variables, and the wind-shield effect of the buildings that have the same U-shape but different orientations. Maybe the authors could also address this kind of discussion in the manuscript.
Author Response
Please see attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
To the authors,
while you addressed most of the minor points, you did not address any of the scientific-related topics raised in the major points. I suggest you do so before resubmitting.
Reviewer 2 Report
I'm happy about the revisions made and authors have significantly improved the paper.
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors have addressed the comments made in the first revision but I’m sorry to say that I don’t think the manuscript has sufficiently improved to be published. Still, I believe the work is interesting but maybe the manuscript needs more corrections than the ones that can be proposed in a peer-review.
The editing of some sentences didn’t improve the understanding of the work that is shown in the manuscript.
For instance:
Lines 40-41: “In most cases, landscapes were replaced by low water consumption plant species.” I understand that the replacement is of plant species with high water requirements, not of the landscape.
Lines 54-55: “Water-efficient landscapes include a variety of plants ranging from rain-fed to low water use” Rain-fed is not a type of plant, is a type of farming.
Lines 58-59: “The tree-turf landscape induces high ET, also known as a mesic landscape [13].” The sentence is not written properly, maybe due to swift editing. Additionally ET drivers are net radiation, temperature, relative humidity and wind speed. The landscape does not “induce” high ET.
Lines 65-68 :” The irrigation source of xeric landscape is drip irrigation, having an irrigation application efficiency higher than those of sprinklers (typically used for mesic landscape)[16]. Consequently, landscapes have low ET rates in the summertime. The oasis landscapes consist of low and high-water use plants. The landscape is irrigated by sprinkler and drip irrigation; therefore, ET is lower than the mesic landscape.” Drip, sprinkler and surface irrigation are irrigation systems, not sources. It is not clear from the text, as it is written, why or how using one irrigation system or another affects ET and why in sumertime especially.
I don’t mean to make a thorough review but using a precise language is important when conveying the ideas of a research work.
Other remarks about the manuscript. The introduction is focused in describing previous work and the characteristics of the software used in the microclimate modeling, it does not explain sufficiently why it is important to undertake the work presented in the manuscript. The objective of the work (lines130 to 132 ) is scarcely defined. Subdivision of the main objective into smaller and well defined objectives could improve the explanation of the results obtained and reader’s understanding.
As for the results, temperature intervals of figure 4 are different for each type of landscape. It is difficult to compare and assess if there is a difference between the temperatures of the surfaces in each landscape based in this figure’s interpretation.
