Reconstructed natural runoff helps to quantify the relationship  between upstream water use and downstream water  scarcity in China's river basins

Zhou, Xinyao; Yang, Yonghui; Sheng, Zhuping; Zhang, Yongqiang

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-2491-2019

Articles | Volume 23, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-2491-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-2491-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 23, issue 5

Research article

|

28 May 2019

Research article |

| 28 May 2019

Reconstructed natural runoff helps to quantify the relationship between upstream water use and downstream water scarcity in China's river basins

Xinyao Zhou, Yonghui Yang, Zhuping Sheng, and Yongqiang Zhang

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Final revised paper (published on 28 May 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 24 Jul 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Comments', Anonymous Referee #1, 08 Aug 2018
- AC1: 'Response to Reviwer #1', Yonghui Yang, 18 Oct 2018
RC2: 'Major Revision', Anonymous Referee #2, 31 Aug 2018
- AC2: 'Response to Reviwer #2', Yonghui Yang, 18 Oct 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) (27 Oct 2018) by Xing Yuan

AR by Yonghui Yang on behalf of the Authors (07 Jan 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (10 Jan 2019) by Xing Yuan

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (16 Jan 2019)

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (30 Jan 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I think the revised manuscript was improved by the authors. However, the results part was still not well organized. I take section 3.2.1 for example. You firstly talked about WTA, the details for each basin were given (L12-13), but you started to descript FI in L14. Then you described WTA again, and last FI again! I strongly recommend you to separate the descriptions of WTA and FI, and don’t mix up them! In figure 4, you should mark clearly (by vertical line?) which basins are humid, semi-humid…, so that the readers can follow up easily what you were saying in the figure. The use of the definitions were also confusing. You’ve already defined the water scarcity by WAT and FI, so please do not use per capita water availability (L14) again in the results, but use FI (In contrast, sometimes you used WTA instead water use to availability (L16)). Last, I strongly recommend you rename the abbreviations, i.e.., WTA to WS and FI to WA. Otherwise, the readers may be very easy to forget the meaning of the WAT (WAT seems water availability but actually refers to water stress in your definition, very misleading) and FI when they are reading the results.
L20, you’ve defined WTA as water stress, so the “stress level” is misleading. The readers may think you were only talking about WAT. Maybe change to scarcity level (because you were talking about both FI and WTA)? In summary, please use water stress, water availability, and water scarcity very strictly according to your definitions.
L30, do not use per capita water availability but use FI or WA suggested by me.
L26, how did you define the critical period? Why was 1980s critical when FI changed little? Apparently, you defined the critical period by WTA, but why not FI?
P4L19, how was this gridded dataset generated? Please introduce the method briefly.
P5L27, how was Ra calculated?
P6L13, WAT refers to water stress, how about FI? According to P10L7-8, both of them were stress. So the authors should make very clear definitions on water stress, water availability, water scarcity, and do not mix up them in the results. According the title, I think WTA refers to water stress, and FI refers to water availability. Both of them constituted the water scarcity.
P9, figure 5 was not cited by the main text.
P7, section 3.1. This section is to evaluate the reliability of the framework. So the comparison of simulated and observed annual runoff during 1971-2010 was meaningless (runoff was not natural!). Quantitative indicators were needed to evaluate the framework during 1961-1970.
P9L2-3, I think stressed should be used for WTA because WTA refers to water stress. I understand that both WTA and FI can be described as stress according to your definition (P6L13-15), but it is very confusing when the readers try to link the stress to either WTA or FI. So please avoid describing FI as stressed (the water availability can be described as low or high?).
P9L3, here, you were talking about FI in the upstream, why was it related to water use?
P10, figure 8 was not cited by the main text.
Section 3.2.2, this section was not well organized neither. You first introduce FI, and then WTA, and last FI again. Please move “from the FI…” to the P9L12.
P9L25, which basins?
Figure 6, how did you quantify the nexus? I guess by S1-S2? If I’m correct, please remove the S1 and S2, and only keep S1-S2.
Figure 7, I think the most extreme case for water scarcity is that when WTA is maximum and FI is minimum. So please change the direction of the X axis (i.e., from 10500 to 0) to make it more clear.
Figure 8, I can’t understand this figure. What do the 3*3 grids mean?
P11L6-9, it seems that the work by Du et al. (2016) was about human interventions but you were talking about snow and glacier melt. In the mountainous area, the Budyko framework performed poorly, so I don’t understand you can apply the framework directly in the mountainous sub-basins (L12).
P13L29-32, please give the details of water scarcity (i.e., WTA and FI). Water scarcity here is not easy to understand.

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ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by editor and referees) (07 Feb 2019) by Xing Yuan

AR by Yonghui Yang on behalf of the Authors (12 Mar 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (01 Apr 2019) by Xing Yuan

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (23 Apr 2019)

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (23 Apr 2019) by Xing Yuan

AR by Yonghui Yang on behalf of the Authors (28 Apr 2019) Manuscript

Short summary

Quantifying the impact of upstream water use on downstream water scarcity is critical for water management. Comparing natural and observed runoff in China's 12 basins, this study found surface water use increased 1.6 times for the 1970s-2000s, driving most arid and semi-arid (ASA) basins into water scarcity status. The water stress decreased downstream in ASA basins due to reduced upstream inflow since the 2000s. Upstream water use caused over a 30 % increase in water scarcity in ASA basins.