Application of CryoSat-2 altimetry data for river analysis and modelling

Schneider, Raphael; Godiksen, Peter Nygaard; Villadsen, Heidi; Madsen, Henrik; Bauer-Gottwein, Peter

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-751-2017

Articles | Volume 21, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-751-2017

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-751-2017

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

Articles | Volume 21, issue 2

Research article

|

07 Feb 2017

Research article |

| 07 Feb 2017

Application of CryoSat-2 altimetry data for river analysis and modelling

Raphael Schneider, Peter Nygaard Godiksen, Heidi Villadsen, Henrik Madsen, and Peter Bauer-Gottwein

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Final revised paper (published on 07 Feb 2017)
Preprint (discussion started on 23 Jun 2016)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of "Application of Cryosat-2 altimetry data for river analysis and modelling"', Anonymous Referee #1, 18 Jul 2016
- AC1: 'Reply to Anonymous Referee #1', Raphael Schneider, 19 Sep 2016
RC2: 'Review of "Application of CryoSat-2 altimetry data for river analysis and modelling” by R. Schneider et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 20 Sep 2016
- AC2: 'Reply to Anonymous Referee #2', Raphael Schneider, 24 Sep 2016

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (17 Oct 2016) by Hannah Cloke

AR by Raphael Schneider on behalf of the Authors (14 Nov 2016) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (15 Nov 2016) by Hannah Cloke

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (05 Dec 2016)

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (15 Dec 2016)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The paper is deeply improved and many suggestions I gave are well accepted by the authors of the manuscript. However, a pair of points remain not fully clear to me and I’d like to ask the authors for clarification.
1) I appreciated the description of the hydraulic and rainfall-runoff model and the added comments. All is more clear and balanced. I would like to know: which are the parameters necessary to run the rainfall-runoff model (maybe it could be added in the manuscript)? why the authors did not use the two gauged stations of Hardinge Bridge and Bahadurabad station for the calibration of the parameters?
2) Why the authors write the Manning value in SI units? It can be specified in s/m^(1/3).
3) I believe that Figure 1 can be improved by adding some references that the authors cite along the text (Tibetan Plateau, Assam Valley, Himalayan Mountains). Moreover, could be interesting also to see the location of the 2 gauged stations inside the Brahmaputra basin.
Concerning the problem to have the station of Bahadurabad outside of the basin, GIS could be forced with the river line, in the way to have the edge of the basin coherent with the river. If the authors derived the river shape from SRTM, how they obtain this uncoherent shape of the basin? On the SCALGOLIVE website, I checked the limits of the Brahmaputra river basin and it seems right. I suggest the authors to check the polygon.
4) The part regarding the cross-section calibration is improved, even if the reader can be a little bit confused by the different number of cross sections described in the text (13 virtual station) and in the Table 1 (27 for ENVISAT and 24 for Cryosat-2). It should be appreciate a comment of Table 1 for clarifying the different number.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (further review by Editor) (17 Dec 2016) by Hannah Cloke

AR by Raphael Schneider on behalf of the Authors (19 Dec 2016) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (06 Jan 2017) by Hannah Cloke

AR by Raphael Schneider on behalf of the Authors (13 Jan 2017) Manuscript

Short summary

We use water level observations from the CryoSat-2 satellite in combination with a river model of the Brahmaputra River, extracting satellite data over a dynamic river mask derived from Landsat imagery. The novelty of this work is the use of the CryoSat-2 water level observations, collected using a complex spatio-temporal sampling scheme, to calibrate a hydrodynamic river model. The resulting model accurately reproduces water levels, without precise knowledge of river bathymetry.