Water restrictions under climate change: a Rhône–Mediterranean perspective combining bottom-up and top-down approaches

Sauquet, Eric; Richard, Bastien; Devers, Alexandre; Prudhomme, Christel

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-3683-2019

Articles | Volume 23, issue 9

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-3683-2019

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-3683-2019

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

Articles | Volume 23, issue 9

Research article

|

13 Sep 2019

Research article |

| 13 Sep 2019

Water restrictions under climate change: a Rhône–Mediterranean perspective combining bottom-up and top-down approaches

Eric Sauquet, Bastien Richard, Alexandre Devers, and Christel Prudhomme

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Final revised paper (published on 13 Sep 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 11 Sep 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of hess-2018--456', Anonymous Referee #1, 26 Oct 2018
- AC5: 'Response Reviewer1', E. Sauquet, 04 Jan 2019
SC1: 'Review by student', Jan Seibert, 02 Nov 2018
- AC2: 'Response J. Seibert', E. Sauquet, 03 Jan 2019
RC2: 'Sauquet et al. 2018 HESS Review Comments', Anonymous Referee #2, 15 Nov 2018
- AC3: 'Response Reviewer2', E. Sauquet, 03 Jan 2019
RC3: 'Comments to the paper “Water restrictions under climate change: a Rhone-Mediterranean perspective combining ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’ approaches”', Anonymous Referee #3, 17 Nov 2018
- AC4: 'Response Reviewer3', E. Sauquet, 03 Jan 2019

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (09 Jan 2019) by Roberto Greco

AR by E. Sauquet on behalf of the Authors (20 Feb 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (03 Mar 2019) by Roberto Greco

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (05 Mar 2019)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (08 Mar 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Major comments
1. It’s not clear how water use is handled in the modeling framework. This is given very little attention in the paper. From the response to other reviewers its clear that water use is not simulated. This may be acceptable for the purposes of the paper, but limitations should be mentioned (i.e. agricultural water use will go up in hot years). Additionally, there is a feedback between use and streamflow that is not addressed. My assumption is that the impact of water use on streamflow is not accounted for. Is that correct? There are multiple observation and simulation points per basin (as illustrated in figure 1). Does the amount of water extracted at these points never impact other simulation/extraction points? If not the lack of integration between use and the streamflow model may be quite problematic and contributes to my concern that the streamflow modeling yields improved performance (on one metric) when compared to streamflow data because the model is right for the wrong reasons. Overall I’m left with the impression that while the water use restriction simulation is described as the main contribution of the paper it is not very robust.
2. The authors made a simplifying assumption that all basins had the same regulatory thresholds. Does this explain the poor sensitivity score with observed streamflow? I'm concerned that this is not a meaningful indicator and that the higher performance of the GR6J on this metric is not meaningful and perhaps misleading. Additionally, why can the basin specific rules not be investigated on a regional scale? While this may be somewhat tedious if the data is available it could be coded up and then give more insight into where the discrepancy between the model and observations is.
3. I appreciate the authors response to my questions on the CART analysis and see the value of this analysis. I think that the links between this and the WR simulations could be quite information but the discussion of these implications in the conclusions section is not clear. For example, on lines 676 to 678, the two sentences beginning on line 678 are confusing. It sounds like you are predicting regulations which you are not. Are you talking about the contrast in when/how frequently restrictions are employed across catchments?
4. Lines 630-644 could be a powerful section that links this work to ongoing water policy discussions, however, it does not yet achieve this. Part of the problem is poor sentence structure that confuses your message (noted below). Additionally, while you state that your work contributes to this discussion you do not demonstrate it. Explaining with examples or specific descriptions how this work fits in would strengthen the paper.

Editorial comments
• Line 140-142 phase beginning with ‘water resource availability’ not clear
• Line 223 ‘others’ should read ‘other’
• Line 321 – I am not familiar with the word ‘dekad’ – spelling?
• Line 371 close parentheses missing
• Line 570 ‘2050’ should read ‘2040’
• On line 635 the structure of the sentence makes it seem as if you claim that the results show that the water use restrictions impact public attention. This may be true but there is no data/analysis to support this so I suspect you really mean something else.
• Line 675 ‘sensibility’ should read ‘sensitivity’

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RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (22 Mar 2019)

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (26 Mar 2019) by Roberto Greco

AR by E. Sauquet on behalf of the Authors (07 May 2019)

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (20 May 2019) by Roberto Greco

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (02 Jul 2019)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (02 Jul 2019) by Roberto Greco

AR by E. Sauquet on behalf of the Authors (15 Jul 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (24 Jul 2019) by Roberto Greco

AR by E. Sauquet on behalf of the Authors (01 Aug 2019)

Short summary

This study aims to identify catchments and the associated water uses vulnerable to climate change. Vulnerability is considered here to be the likelihood of water restrictions which are unacceptable for agricultural uses. This study provides the first regional analysis of the stated water restrictions, highlighting heterogeneous decision-making processes; data from a national system of compensation to farmers for uninsurable damages were used to characterize past failure events.