Modeling the potential impacts of climate change on the water table level of selected forested wetlands in the   southeastern United States

Zhu, Jie; Sun, Ge; Li, Wenhong; Zhang, Yu; Miao, Guofang; Noormets, Asko; McNulty, Steve G.; King, John S.; Kumar, Mukesh; Wang, Xuan

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-6289-2017

Articles | Volume 21, issue 12

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-6289-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Special issue:

Coupled terrestrial-aquatic approaches to watershed-scale...

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-6289-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 21, issue 12

Research article

|

13 Dec 2017

Research article |

| 13 Dec 2017

Modeling the potential impacts of climate change on the water table level of selected forested wetlands in the southeastern United States

Jie Zhu, Ge Sun, Wenhong Li, Yu Zhang, Guofang Miao, Asko Noormets, Steve G. McNulty, John S. King, Mukesh Kumar, and Xuan Wang

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Final revised paper (published on 13 Dec 2017)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 18 Apr 2017)
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

RC1: 'Review of Zhu et al', Anonymous Referee #1, 17 May 2017
- AC1: 'Response to Anonymous Referee #1', Ge Sun, 12 Jul 2017
RC2: 'Anonymous Review', Anonymous Referee #2, 17 May 2017
- AC2: 'Response to Anonymous Referee #2', Ge Sun, 12 Jul 2017

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by Editor and Referees) (16 Jul 2017) by xuesong zhang

AR by Ge Sun on behalf of the Authors (07 Aug 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (17 Aug 2017) by xuesong zhang

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (24 Sep 2017)

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (26 Sep 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Authors have shown great efforts in revising the manuscript; however, there are still some minor problems.

1. For the “Supplementary Table S1”, the name of the last category (e.g., Atmosphere Resolution (lat x lon)) can be changed into “Atmosphere Grid in Degrees (lat x lon)”; thus, the subsequent column can be written as, for example, 2.8 x 2.8 only.
2. Please clarify/specify the phrase “high efficiency and acceptable performance” of the statistical models; for example, in which aspect do they have high efficiency and acceptable performance?
3. “single GCMs” or “single GCM”? “GCM” or “GCMs”? please keep them consistent throughout the manuscript.
4. Plots for Figure 3 are not the same size; also, the positions of site name and R are not aligned, and please unify the format of whether a space is needed before/after the sign “=” for the R value.
5. Same problem for Figure 2 and Figure 4, where the site names need to be kept in one common place. If it is not possible to keep the names in the upper-left corner within the plot, authors can consider putting the names outside the plots on the left side, for example. OR just name them with a,b,c,d,etc and specify them within the figure captions.
6. It seems that the map in figure 1 is distorted. It is better to keep the correct size of the map.
7. For Figure 6, the site name has already been mentioned on each of the graphs, so there is no need to re-write the site name on the y-axis. Moreover, the site names are not in alignment with each other, please adjust.
8. Please change “Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 and RCP 8.5 scenarios” to “Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) 4.5 and 8.5 scenarios”. Please correct them in the rest of your manuscript accordingly.
9. In your title, you changed “hydrology” to “water table content”
10. In line 116, please change “severn” to “seven”.
11. Since you changed “hydrology” to “water table content” in your title to specify your research, please justify in your manuscript why you still use the word “wetland hydrology” since it is a broad concept.
12. Line 250: please change “… include the precipitation …” to “ … include precipitation…”.
13. Line 252: instead of putting the link as in-text citation, please give a name of the author/institution of this website. Links can be included in the references.
14. Lines 267: please change “mean daily” to “daily mean”, and “the 20 GCMs” to “20 GCMs”.
15. Line 274: Please rewrite the sentence “we analyzed the historical and future climate conditions key to wetland hydrology, including the daily maximum temperature near the surface (2 m), daily minimum temperature near the surface (2 m),…”. Authors can consider changing the “daily maximum temperature near the surface (2m)” to “daily maximum near surface temperature” since near surface temperature refers to "temperature at 2 meter".
16. In the manuscript text, authors have mentioned that 1980-1999 refers to the end of 20th century, 2040-2059 as mid-21st century, and 2080-2099 for the end of 21st century; while for Figure 4, the captions were “mid 20-4.5: 2040-2059, RCP 4.5” and “late 20-4.5: 2080-2099, RCP 4.5”. Please justify.
17. Line 551: please change “Future predicted PET” to “The predicted PET”.
18. Line 562: “RCP4.5” and “RCP8.5”, please keep them consistent in the manuscript since in other places authors have written as “RCP 4.5” and “RCP 8.5” with a space in-between.
19. Line 562: please change “Fig. 5” to “Figure 5”; also keep them consistent throughout the manuscript for other figures.
20. Line 628: please clarify the sentence “Although the model structure proved the same in all five wetlands, and had good performance overall, a closer comparison shows differing influences on the wetland hydrology”. What do you mean by “proved the same”?
21. Please change “in RCP 8.5 scenario” to “under RCP 8.5 scenario”, the same applied to RCP 4.5, and please keep them consistent throughout the manuscript.
22. Please rewrite the sentence “This may not only be due to the PET increase, which was similar to that of the other three sites (AR, LP, and SC), but also because the precipitation decreased in the wetland FL, while it increased at the other sites.”. it seems a little bit wordy and not clear/concise enough.
23. Please be careful when using the word “the”. There are some places where “the” can be eliminated. Proofread by a native speaker is recommended.
24. Line 723: please justify why your “models were able to accurately predict different water table dynamics…”? Please also noted that “the” can be eliminated for “the different water table dynamics”.
25. Line 912, please change “the model developed by this study” to “the model developed in this study”.
26. Line 973, please change “under future climate change” to “under future climate change scenarios”.
27. The conclusion section is a little bit short. Please strengthen this part by including what the authors have done and what are the significant results, the associated contributions, as well as the future work if possible.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (further review by Editor) (02 Oct 2017) by xuesong zhang

AR by Ge Sun on behalf of the Authors (11 Oct 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (29 Oct 2017) by xuesong zhang

AR by Ge Sun on behalf of the Authors (02 Nov 2017) Manuscript

Short summary

Forested wetlands provide myriad ecosystem services threatened by climate change. This study develops empirical hydrologic models by synthesizing hydrometeorological data across the southeastern US. We used global climate projections to model hydrological changes for five wetlands. We found all wetlands are predicted to become drier by the end of this century. This study suggests that climate change may substantially affect wetland biogeochemical cycles and other functions in the future.