Hydrological recurrence as a measure for large river basin classification and process understanding

Fernandez, R.; Sayama, T.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-19-1919-2015

Articles | Volume 19, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-19-1919-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-19-1919-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 19, issue 4

Research article

|

22 Apr 2015

Research article |

| 22 Apr 2015

Hydrological recurrence as a measure for large river basin classification and process understanding

R. Fernandez and T. Sayama

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Final revised paper (published on 22 Apr 2015)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 18 Jul 2014)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC C3032: 'What is "recurrence"? Need to define and illustrate better', Anonymous Referee #1, 11 Aug 2014
- AC C3271: 'Response to Anonymous Referee #1', Rodrigo Fernandez, 22 Aug 2014
  - SC C3279: 'Some further questions about the link with seasonality', Wouter Berghuijs, 22 Aug 2014
    - AC C3823: 'Response to Short Comment by Wouter Berghuijs', Rodrigo Fernandez, 16 Sep 2014
RC C3830: 'Review on Hydrological recurrence as a measure for large river basin classification and process understanding by Fernandez and Sayama', Anonymous Referee #2, 17 Sep 2014
- AC C4394: 'Response to Anonymous Referee#2', Rodrigo Fernandez, 09 Oct 2014

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (11 Nov 2014) by Carlo De Michele

AR by Rodrigo Fernandez on behalf of the Authors (23 Dec 2014)

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (21 Jan 2015) by Carlo De Michele

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (12 Feb 2015)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I really appreciate what the authors did through the revision procedure, and I am very much impressed with their revision. I basically want to suggest the acceptance of this manuscript, after very minor modification. A set of my last recommendations for very minor modification is as follows.

At first, a word like “monthly-scale” should be added to the title. The conclusions of this study are very much specific to large river basins in the globe and monthly time scale. Although the same mathematical formula can be applied to any scale and any basin, I do not think similar kinds of implications and conclusions can be obtained. If hourly data for a small basin is used and if the temporal fluctuation of the data is very high, the direction of research and analysis will be much different from the current study.

Because of the above reasoning, I do not think the last sentence of the Abstract is relevant. I do not think the framework is easily applicable at different scales. The authors or other researchers may try to use the same framework for different scales. But, it is another story. Only from this study, it is not sure whether this framework is successfully applicable outside of “large basins” and “monthly data”.

Also about the title, I cannot imagine how this framework is useful for “process understanding”.

By the way, the first part of the caption of Fig 18 "Model differences. " is too short, even though there are additional explanations in the caption.

Finally, the following is only a comment which the authors do not need to follow.
By the subsection 5.1.1., the difference between recurrence and seasonality is somehow visible. I personally want to know, in which part of the world recurrence is different from seasonality. It would be interesting if the authors plot the data in Figure 12 onto a global map to show where seasonality is different from recurrence. I imagine recurrence is different from seasonality in basins like Murray-Darling where interannual variability exceeds seasonal variations. A global map of showing how much recurrence is different from seasonality might be interesting. For example, a similar figure of Fig 5 but for seasonality can be made.

But I do not demand it to the authors for this particular paper. It is too demanding. However, because of the subsection 5.1.1. and some other results text newly added to this paper, I have a feeling that recurrence is a measure contaminating seasonality (based on long-term climatology) and interannual-variability (which may further included interdecadal variability). Contamination makes us difficult to interpret. Thus, a straightforward way of classification and interpretation would be to use both seasonality and interannual variability, rather than relying on a single contaminated measure. A way to avoid contamination would be to use both seasonality and recurrence, by recognizing the overlap between these two particularly in terms of seasonality. Nevertheless, I appreciate the authors' trial to show a measure that is beyond seasonality that is depending only on climatology.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (15 Mar 2015)

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (18 Mar 2015) by Carlo De Michele

AR by Rodrigo Fernandez on behalf of the Authors (26 Mar 2015) Manuscript