The water balance components of undisturbed tropical woodlands in the Brazilian cerrado

Oliveira, P. T. S.; Wendland, E.; Nearing, M. A.; Scott, R. L.; Rosolem, R.; da Rocha, H. R.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-19-2899-2015

Articles | Volume 19, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-19-2899-2015

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-19-2899-2015

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

Articles | Volume 19, issue 6

Research article

|

22 Jun 2015

Research article |

| 22 Jun 2015

The water balance components of undisturbed tropical woodlands in the Brazilian cerrado

P. T. S. Oliveira, E. Wendland, M. A. Nearing, R. L. Scott, R. Rosolem, and H. R. da Rocha

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Final revised paper (published on 22 Jun 2015)
Preprint (discussion started on 21 Nov 2014)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC C5958: 'Comments to the authors', Anonymous Referee #1, 07 Jan 2015
RC C6298: 'Interactive comment on', Anonymous Referee #2, 03 Feb 2015
RC C6334: 'Review comments', Anonymous Referee #3, 05 Feb 2015
AC C6554: 'Response to Reviewers' comments', Paulo Tarso S. Oliveira, 25 Feb 2015
AC C6556: 'Changes Noted', Paulo Tarso S. Oliveira, 25 Feb 2015
AC C6557: 'Manuscript', Paulo Tarso S. Oliveira, 25 Feb 2015

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (29 Mar 2015) by Hannah Cloke

AR by Paulo Tarso Oliveira on behalf of the Authors (07 Apr 2015) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (12 Apr 2015) by Hannah Cloke

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (25 Apr 2015)

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (02 May 2015)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Review comments on the paper "The water balance components of undisturbed tropical woodlands in the Brazilian Cerrado" by Oliveira et al.
Article Submitted to Hydrology and Earth System Science.

GENERAL COMMENT:
This manuscript presents new information about water balance over the brazilian Cerrado based on observations from 2 sites. The study analyses a wide range of hydrological fluxes as precipitation, evapotranspiration, interception, surface runoff, infiltration and soil moisture.
The questions addressed in the paper are important as Cerrado is an important region of Brazil/South America that may experience important transformations, which can cause important impacts over hydrology of major/important river basins. The paper is generally well written, most of the methods are appropriated and conclusions are supported by analyses. I would be pleased to see this work published at HESS.
However, some of the questions raised in the last round of review were not fully addressed by the authors. The authors bring some explanations in the response letter that clarifies part of the issues. However, these clarifications were not added in the new version of the manuscript. The final manuscript should fully answer the following issues:
SPECIFIC COMMENTS:
Findings from two sites vs Cerrado region:
How these findings (typical values of hydrological fluxes) from 2 sites can be generalized/extrapolated to the Cerrado region? Can it be generalized over a typical catchment of Cerrado? How spatially variable are such hydrological fluxes in the Cerrado? For example, should we expect similar runoff rates at different parts of a catchment (low land areas close to stream (riparian areas) vs upland areas)? Or should we expect that most of surface runoff is generated close to streams at saturated areas, following Dunnian concept of flow generation processes? Please discuss and clarify these issues in the manuscript.
Discharge from stream gauges:
The author did a good job in the analyses most of the hydrological fluxes. However, analyses concerning the sinks of soil water are not conclusive. It would be interesting to look at discharge data from stream gauges and convert it to runoff (mm/year) to compare it with the water balance terms obtained in this study. It would be easy to find discharge and precipitation data from ANA dataset for the studied region and make some water balance analyses (prec, runoff and evapotranspitarion) to compare to the numbers found in the paper and I think that such comparisons should appear in the paper. This way, it would also be possible to infer about the sink of soil water (evaporation or subsurface and groundwater flow). For example, how overall runoff coefficient compares with runoff ratio obtained using precipitation and discharge from stream gauges? How local water balance compares to basin scale water balance? The conclusions concerning water storage can change depending on the results from such analyses. Please clarify it in the new version of the manuscript.
Infiltration, groundwater recharge, constant water table…
The manuscript assumes that as the groundwater table did not changed, then it means that water that infiltrated is not reaching groundwater. However, an alternative that was not explored is that the flux of water reaching groundwater zone may be in balance to groundwater outflow. For example, if S is groundwater storage, I is recharge and O is outflow, then dS/dt=I-O. Results show that dS/dt is close to zero. Then recharge equals outflow I=O. Please clarify it in the manuscript.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (Editor review) (20 May 2015) by Hannah Cloke

AR by Paulo Tarso Oliveira on behalf of the Authors (28 May 2015) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (01 Jun 2015) by Hannah Cloke

AR by Paulo Tarso Oliveira on behalf of the Authors (02 Jun 2015)

Short summary

We determined the main components of the water balance for an undisturbed cerrado. Evapotranspiration ranged from 1.91 to 2.60mm per day for the dry and wet seasons, respectively. Canopy interception ranged from 4 to 20% and stemflow values were approximately 1% of gross precipitation. The average runoff coefficient was less than 1%, while cerrado deforestation has the potential to increase that amount up to 20-fold. The water storage may be estimated by the difference between P and ET.