Searching for the optimal drought index and timescale combination to detect drought: a case study from the lower Jinsha River basin, China

Fluixá-Sanmartín, Javier; Pan, Deng; Fischer, Luzia; Orlowsky, Boris; García-Hernández, Javier; Jordan, Frédéric; Haemmig, Christoph; Zhang, Fangwei; Xu, Jijun

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-889-2018

Articles | Volume 22, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-889-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-889-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 22, issue 1

Research article

|

01 Feb 2018

Research article |

| 01 Feb 2018

Searching for the optimal drought index and timescale combination to detect drought: a case study from the lower Jinsha River basin, China

Javier Fluixá-Sanmartín, Deng Pan, Luzia Fischer, Boris Orlowsky, Javier García-Hernández, Frédéric Jordan, Christoph Haemmig, Fangwei Zhang, and Jijun Xu

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Final revised paper (published on 01 Feb 2018)
Preprint (discussion started on 19 Apr 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of Fluixá-Sanmartín et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 25 May 2017
- AC1: 'Authors reply to Referee #1', Javier Fluixá-Sanmartín, 12 Jul 2017
RC2: 'Comment on paper: "Searching for the optimal drought index and time scale combination to detect drought: a case study from the lower Jinsha River Basin, China” by Javier Fluixá-Sanmartín et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 29 May 2017
- AC2: 'Authors reply to Referee #2', Javier Fluixá-Sanmartín, 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) (01 Aug 2017) by Pierre Gentine

AR by Javier Fluixa-Sanmartin on behalf of the Authors (07 Sep 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (05 Oct 2017) by Pierre Gentine

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (09 Nov 2017)

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (06 Dec 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have done a good job of responding to the reviewers' comments; the manuscript has significantly improved. The minor revisions listed below should be addressed, at which point I believe the manuscript will be ready for publication.

Pg. 2, Ln 2: This is too narrow a definition of drought. This should either be specified as a definition of meteorological drought or this sentence should be further qualified.

Pg. 2, Ln. 10: Clause starting "to which" is awkward and should be restructured.

Pg. 2, Ln 30: There is no such thing as PET data. The authors mean that the data necessary to calculate PET are not available.

Pg. 4, Ln 3: "Evaporation is 10 to 20 times of precipitation during the dry season..." Despite saying this, I still think the authors downplay ET overall. This limits their investigation of exclusively precipitation data. I understand their data limitation, but more caveats and caution could be provided in light of the relative role that ET likely plays in the annual moisture budget in the region.

Pg. 4, Ln 8: Remove "be affected"

Pg. 13, Ln. 11: I missed this detail in the original manuscript, but this level of interpolation seems vastly unrealistic given only 29 stations across the domain. The authors discuss their grid choice as being a balance of grid cell density and computation, but the real limitation is sampling density. I would be very concerned about aliasing in this context. At the very least, however, the resolution of the grid far exceeds the sampling density and overestimates the amount of information in the grid. That can be seen clearly, for instance, in the map plotted in Figure 3, where the patterns are smoothed significantly relative to the grid sizing.

Pg. 16, Ln. 1: "can be extracted from Thornes and Stephenson (2001)" is too vague. The authors should include enough detail on this point to provide more clarity in text about how they have estimated the SE.

Pg. 18, Ln. 15: The idea that 13 events prevents cross validation is not very well justified. Yes, it is a small number of events, but what quantitative measure demonstrates that this sampling is too small for something like leave-one-out CV? I don't necessary disagree with the authors, but their argument here is subjective without clearer statistical reasoning.

Figure 5: The red oval in the figure is odd and not described. I don't think it is needed.

Pg 19, Ln. 1: This is not the correct interpretation of the 95% CIs in this case. At least as I understand what they have done, the CIs in this case represent the range of model assessment, i.e. the spread based on different choices of indices etc. Only a CV experiment would yield an assessment of the skill scores in the context of sampling. This description should be revised.

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (20 Dec 2017) by Pierre Gentine

AR by Javier Fluixa-Sanmartin on behalf of the Authors (28 Dec 2017) Manuscript

Short summary

In China, droughts represent a severe threat to socioeconomic development and ecosystems. It is thus necessary to characterize these events in order to reduce and anticipate their impacts. This study proposes an innovative approach for a catchment-wide drought detection and characterization. Two overall drought indicators have been defined and calibrated with real historical events, which have been collected and cataloged.