Automatic identification of alternating morphological units  in river channels using wavelet analysis and ridge extraction

Mahdade, Mounir; Le Moine, Nicolas; Moussa, Roger; Navratil, Oldrich; Ribstein, Pierre

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3513-2020

Articles | Volume 24, issue 7

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3513-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3513-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 24, issue 7

Research article

|

14 Jul 2020

Research article |

| 14 Jul 2020

Automatic identification of alternating morphological units in river channels using wavelet analysis and ridge extraction

Mounir Mahdade, Nicolas Le Moine, Roger Moussa, Oldrich Navratil, and Pierre Ribstein

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Final revised paper (published on 14 Jul 2020)
Supplement to the final revised paper
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: '“Wavelet and index methods for the identification of pool–riffle sequences” by Mahdade et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 03 Feb 2019
- AC1: 'Reply to the Anonymous Referee #1', Mounir MAHDADE, 19 Sep 2019
RC2: 'Pasternack review of HESS-2018-381', Gregory Pasternack, 24 Jul 2019
- AC2: 'Reply to Prof. Gregory Pasternack', Mounir MAHDADE, 19 Sep 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) (06 Oct 2019) by Theresa Blume

AR by Mounir Mahdade on behalf of the Authors (12 Feb 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (02 Mar 2020) by Theresa Blume

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (28 Mar 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I would like to thank you the authors for replying to my questions. In my opinion, the authors completed a significant amount of our and substantially improved the first manuscript. I would like to recommend a number of minor revisions prior to the publication of the paper. More specifically, I would like to recommend to further clarify some concepts, and avoid colloquial/qualitative/vague sentences. The authors can find below a list of recommendations which they might (or might not) consider to further improve their manuscript.
Page 2, line 13: “any alternate morphological units”: the definition of morphological units is provided later in the text (line 18), the authors might consider improving the readability of their manuscript by providing the definition in Line 13.
Page 2, paragraph 1.1: I understand the choice of using sub-paragraphs to improve the organization of the introduction, however, I found this part of the manuscript a bit abrupt. I suggest adding a sentence to clarify the consequentiality between different paragraphs.
Page 3, lines 19-21: could please the authors reword this sentence? Some of the terms are colloquial.
Page 4, lines 6-8: these lines repeat lines 14-15 in page 1.
Page 5, line 4: is “efficiency” the most appropriate term here?
Page 5, lines 6-7: the authors might consider adding a sentence or two the explain why a new method was required. I believe that such an explicit explanation would clarify the scientific relevance of this work.
Page 6, line 19: why did the authors use inverted commas for the word continuous?
Page 6, line 20: “The” should not be capitalised.
Page 6, lines 21-24: albeit the authors’ strategy is reasonable, I believe that adding a few sentences to explain the reasoning underpinning the choice of the variables would increase the scientific soundness of the paper.
Page 6, lines 28-29: I suggest explaining here the motivations that led to the choice of the BDT method as a reference (I am aware that this choice is explained later in the test, however, I feel that adding an explanation here would improve the readability of the manuscript).
Page 8, line 5: I recommend replacing “it seems” with a sound explanation.
Page 9, line 8: I think that the adjective “interesting” is too vague. The authors might consider adding one or two sentences to explain what they mean with such a qualitative word (the readers can then check the appendix to learn all the details).
Page 10, line 14: “amounts” – do the authors mean “requires”?
Page 10, lines 16-20: I appreciate that the authors considerably improved the structure of their first manuscript, however, these lines contains significant references that belong to the literature review.
Page 11, line 20: “the extraction” OF…. I suggest improving the readability of this sentence.
Page 12, line 6: the authors might consider adding “that is” before “the region…” to improve the readability of the sentence.
Page 12, line 8: I suggest replacing “special” with something less colloquial. What does “special” mean in this context?
Page 12, line 11: is the reference to equation 8 correct?
Page 12, line 24: please remove “the” before “Eq.14”.
Page 15, lines 7-8: I suggest rewording this sentence to match the writing style of a scientific publication.
Page 15, lines 18-20: could please the authors clarify this sentence?
Page 16, line 10: could please the authors clarify the meaning of “which is corrected afterwards.”?
Page18, line 8: could please the authors reword “work onto an…”?
Page 19, lines 7-22: in my opinion, the readers can infer these pieces of information (by themselves) from the table. Could please the authors provide an in-depth interpretation of these results?
Page 19, line 24: could please the authors explain the choice of the word “interestingly”? How “interestingly”?
Page 21, lines 1-2: I believe that this result was somewhat expected. The authors might consider to further elaborate this concept.
Page 21, line 6: the BDT method has already been introduced. I suggest avoiding this repetition.
Page 21, line 7: the BDT method does not require expert judgement, however, is the BDT method accurate? Could please the authors provide some reference?
Page 22, line 14: could please the authors explain and reword “is done a sort of multiple calculations”?
Page 22, line 21: could please the authors replace “reasonable” with a quantitative or semi-quantitative assessment? In my opinion, “reasonable” is too vague.
Page 22, line 25: could please the authors elaborate on the potential reasons underpinning this “big difference”?
Page 24, lines 2-3: what is the difference between “benchmark” and “reference” in this context?
Page 25, line 17: the authors might consider adding a reference to the paragraph presenting the “good results” or a quantitative assessment.
Page 25, line 26: I believe that the authors meant to write “it presents”.
Page 25, line 28: please rephrase “we can say the same thing”.
Page 26, line 7: please reword “on the overall”.

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RR by Gregory Pasternack (04 May 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

First let me apologize for taking double the normal time to conduct this review. I got this request close to the start of the pandemic and of course we have all been going through unprecedented circumstances to address it. Thank you for your patience.

The review I had provided to the original manuscript was very long and rich, and I know that posed both a challenge and an opportunity for the authors to absorb that and use it to improve their manuscript. Thank you for the opportunity to see how the work has progressed and further comment on the topic.

My approach to reviewing the revised manuscript was first to sit down and read the new version as if I had never seen it before. This helped me to think about it from the perspective of any reader. Then, I turned to the other materials to get some deeper insights, as needed.

Overall, the revised manuscript is vastly improved. The literature review is deep and substantive. The authors point out the key insights from past work, but have the courage to go their own way in making judgements about the pros and cons of past ideas. I think that is terrific. This is not only true in the introduction, but also in the discussion section. I found that the methods and results now focus on the most important and novel aspect of the work, and that has yielded a much better product.

Compared to the very long review I wrote before, I am thankful that all the revisions now only lead to this very brief set of recommended minor revisions:

(1) In the methods section, there is a lengthy explanation of the equations, but only a very brief phrase mentioning how all of the work was actually implemented. I think it is important to help enable readers who want to follow in the authors' footsteps to be able to repeat the work with their own data. I checked the website provided as well as the link to Scilab. The information the authors provided is not enough. Please clarify if there already exists a program, module, package, etc that adapts the wavelet code for use in Scilab or if that was something you made yourself? if it already exists, clarify if it may be obtained via the Scilab website or if one has to go elsewhere to get it. if you adapted it yourself, then you should provide a link to that code in the article, preferably to a free, open hosting website like Github. I see that the wavelet analysis tools have been moved to Github and of course Scilab is free, open. Therefore, you should enable readers to follow your lead and use your tools rather than have to reinvent them on their own. This is simple to address.

(2) there are several spelling and grammar mistakes that can be refined through careful scrutiny of the text. This time I am not going to provide that type of editing, because I think the authors should address that.

(3) In the discussion section, I would like to see the authors add a paragraph that would "close the loop" applying the results to the introduction's motivation issue, which was design of hydraulic models. Do you envision wavelet tools being used to design river morphology for use in hydraulic models based on your work? if so, what are your thoughts on how that would be done? River Builder 1.0.0 was recently released on Github, now in Python, at https://github.com/RiverBuilder/RiverBuilder. It does not have wavelet as of yet, but it could if that is something the authors recommend.

Again, I recommend these minor revisions and then publication upon quick review of the associate editor to check the box that the three issues were addressed, with no further external review. Congratulations on a fine effort of revision. May the 4th be with you!

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (07 May 2020) by Theresa Blume

AR by Mounir Mahdade on behalf of the Authors (28 May 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (11 Jun 2020) by Theresa Blume

Dear Authors,

I am glad to see that we are almost ready for publication, only a few more corrections need to be made to make your work more easily accessible/understandable to the reader.

1) Prof. Pasternack asked you to provide the script the you used for your analyses and I agree with him that this would be helpful. Please provide this script in the supplementary material or appendix and refer to it in the methods section.

2) There are still quite a few grammatical errors, please do another round of proof-reading

3) Title: in a river channel or in river channels - please correct

corrections/clarifications:
p.1,l.4: large-scale proxies
p.1,l.11: a set of multiple variables - this seems to be an unnecessary doubling, it could be either "a set of variables" or just "multiple variables".
p.1,l.21: "this is their essential input" - what does "their" refer to? Please clarify
p.2,l.16-18:
"As it is necessary to find a method that can extract information concerning morphologies (position, length, etc.). For this reason, it is interesting to list the works
that quantitatively assess this morphological variability." - I suggest to delete this sentence here as it is more confusing than helpful. If I understand correctly the reviewer was more referring to the fact that the 2nd paragraph under 1 is already starting to describe state of the art methods to determine morphological variability as well as the study objectives and so the sudden break given by the heading of 1.1 comes a bit surprising as the text provides more of a continued discussion of the same topic before and after this break. You also start to provide the study objectives under 1, and then repeat this under 1.2. To improve this you could check if some of the information provided under 1 could also be distributed to both 1.1 and 1.2 so that there is a clearer differentiation between the three sections, keeping section 1 rather short.
p.2,l.19: state of the art
p.15,l.7: "on the other hand" instead of "otherwise"? Otherwise is a bit confusing here.
p.16,l.8: "the correlations between these variables which are well respected" - what do you mean be "well respected"?
p.21,l.14 "according to some studies", not "some researches"
p.25,l.7: delete "some"
p.26,l.3: "it does not preclude"? I am not sure what you are trying to say here - maybe it will be clearer if you rephrase the sentence in a positive way. It is confusing if your final conclusion is that your study does not exclude application of the method to other environments.
p.26,l.4 "possibility of extending the work to other rivers with other types of MUs, other longer reaches with a large number..." - I think there is something missing after the comma, possibly an "or".

Looking forward to publishing your manuscript! This has been a long review process, but also a very successful one. The reviewers have worked hard to provide detailed suggestions and you have worked hard on implementing them.

Best regards,
Theresa Blume

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AR by Mounir Mahdade on behalf of the Authors (19 Jun 2020) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

We present an automatic procedure based on wavelet ridge extraction to identify some characteristics of alternating morphological units (e.g., pools to riffles). We used four hydro-morphological variables (velocity, hydraulic radius, bed shear stress, local channel direction angle). We find that the wavelengths are consistent with the values of the literature, and the use of a multivariate approach yields more robust results and ensures a consistent covariance of flow variables.