Impacts of changing hydrology on permanent  gully growth: experimental results

Day, Stephanie S.; Gran, Karen B.; Paola, Chris

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-3261-2018

Articles | Volume 22, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-3261-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-3261-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 22, issue 6

Research article

|

12 Jun 2018

Research article |

| 12 Jun 2018

Impacts of changing hydrology on permanent gully growth: experimental results

Stephanie S. Day, Karen B. Gran, and Chris Paola

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Final revised paper (published on 12 Jun 2018)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 10 Oct 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

SC1: 'importance of the experiments temporality on the results', Valentin Wendling, 02 Nov 2017
- AC1: 'response to Review', Stephanie Day, 24 Jan 2018
RC1: 'Review Comments', Robert Wells, 06 Nov 2017
- AC2: 'Response to Review', Stephanie Day, 24 Jan 2018
RC2: 'interesting results, but presentation and analysis need some more work', Anonymous Referee #2, 27 Dec 2017
- AC3: 'Response to Review', Stephanie Day, 24 Jan 2018
AC3: 'Response to Review', Stephanie Day, 24 Jan 2018
AC4: 'Marked up Manuscript', Stephanie Day, 24 Jan 2018
AC5: 'Supplementary Data', Stephanie Day, 24 Jan 2018

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (31 Jan 2018) by Thom Bogaard

AR by Stephanie Day on behalf of the Authors (08 Feb 2018)

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (13 Feb 2018) by Thom Bogaard

RR by Robert Wells (12 Mar 2018)

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (10 Apr 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I am not entirely convinced of novelty of this work and I think the authors haven`t fully explored all data yet you can get out of these experiments, but I value the work for what is shows `increased overland flow rates will not result in higher volumes of eroded sediment if water volume stays the same`. I do wonder why the authors did they not measure effective flow shear stress or unit flow shear stress as Gimenez and Govers (2007) concluded this was the best hydraulic variable for predicting erosion rates. This is an important reference work in this area and it is not referenced in this paper, which is a shortcoming. Terminology is also confusing at times (e.g. first sentence of `results and analysis`: water delivery rate, do the authors mean flow discharge here? These were comments in the first review round and they have not been addressed throughout. Same comment for units, flow rates are sometimes expressed as ml/s (in text) sometimes as cm3/s (fig 2) Legend fig 5 not clear. Fig 7: suggest add reference to equation number (Eq. 1?) in legend. Substrate description: normally there is a grain size distribution, as presented now it reads as if the substrates have one homogeneous grain size, which sounds a bit irrealistic if you work with natural sediments or did the authors chose an artificial substrate with one homogeneous grain size? Does this represent natural conditions well enough then? Please reflect more on shortcomings of experimental work and put importance of this work in context. I don`t think it is fair to say that rainfall intensity will have no impact.Please continue to built consistency in the reporting style as requested in previous review round and by addressing my comments mentioned above and add some discussion to the paper after reading the work of Govers and Gimenez and make relevance of your own work clear amongst the work of others. What does this work add? What did we not know yet?

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (20 Apr 2018) by Thom Bogaard

AR by Stephanie Day on behalf of the Authors (30 Apr 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (08 May 2018) by Thom Bogaard

AR by Stephanie Day on behalf of the Authors (16 May 2018)

Short summary

Permanent gullies are deep steep-sided channels that erode as water falls over the upstream end. Erosion of these features is a concern where people and climate change have altered how water moves over the land. This paper analyzes a set of experiments that were used to determine how changing gully flows impact erosion. We found that while increasing the volume of water will increase erosion, changing the flow rate into gullies will not impact the total erosion, but will alter gully shape.