Widespread decline in terrestrial water storage and its link to teleconnections across Asia and eastern Europe

Liu, Xianfeng; Feng, Xiaoming; Ciais, Philippe; Fu, Bojie

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3663-2020

Articles | Volume 24, issue 7

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3663-2020

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3663-2020

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

Articles | Volume 24, issue 7

Research article

|

22 Jul 2020

Research article |

| 22 Jul 2020

Widespread decline in terrestrial water storage and its link to teleconnections across Asia and eastern Europe

Xianfeng Liu, Xiaoming Feng, Philippe Ciais, and Bojie Fu

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Final revised paper (published on 22 Jul 2020)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 15 Aug 2019)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'review hess-2019-281', Anonymous Referee #1, 08 Oct 2019
- AC1: 'Author response to referees' comments #1', Xianfeng Liu, 01 Jan 2020
RC2: 'Review comments on hess-2019-281', Anonymous Referee #2, 14 Oct 2019
- AC2: 'Author response to referees' comments #2', Xianfeng Liu, 01 Jan 2020

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (05 Mar 2020) by Luis Samaniego

AR by Xianfeng Liu on behalf of the Authors (25 Mar 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (30 Mar 2020) by Luis Samaniego

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (19 Apr 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Review of Liu et al (2020) – re-submitted to HESSD

Manuscript of Liu et al. (2020) evaluates the effect of decline in terrestrial water storage across Europe and Asia, derived from GRACE products are complemented with GLDAS LSM simulations. Trends in TWS dynamics are discussed and related to major global teleconnections with associated time lags. I review this manuscript for the first time. I see that authors improved a lot their narration since the original submission. I find this topic interesting and relevant for HESS. The manuscript is clearly written. Below are several minor comments, which should be considered.

(1) Section 3.1: comparison of TWS anomaly with precipitation is useful, but not complete. How about the contribution of global temperature rise and increase evaporative rates? Should be mentioned in this section to complement CRU precipitations.

(2) In your study you evaluate multiple teleconnections. Their interdependencies could have been further decomposed to detect and quantify causal associations among them. I feel it is not necessary to fully implement, but you might have a short discussion on the method presented by Runge et al. 2019 (doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aau4996) and references cited therein in the discussion.

(3) Here are some relevant papers fitting in your manuscript: Yi et al. (2014, doi: 10.1002/2013JB010860) discussing glacier changes in Asia with GRACE and TCs, and Forootan (2019, doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.09.231) discussing IOD and NAO having regional influence on the evolution of hydrological droughts.

(4) Section 3.3 needs to start with statement these are based on the Noah LSM.

(5) Line 108: Figure S1 is not much useful, could be valuable to decompose into several sub-regions (e.g. the same 5 discussed later, Table 1). It does not have much meaning showing it across entire 1.5continents.

Additional comments:
line 24: cycles => cycle
Line 35-37 (split references for the three scales)
Line 43: remove “fortunately” or replace by more neutral term.
Line 46: “threats” replace by “exploitation”
Line 50: challenges => challenge
Line 56: “land” => could you tell which part of the Globe?
Line 67: specify LSM name here
Line 103: thirty-six parameters => “36 variables”
Line 161-162: remove underscore from sigma’s and x’s names.
Line 172-173: rephrase sentence like “Both GRACE-based solutions (JPL-M and CRR-M) show …”
Line 179 and 181: figure “2b” should be “3b”?
Line 332: remove both citations from here.
Figure 4a: include class break at - 0.15 and +0.15, which corresponds to your significance level limit.
Figure 5: caption needs to mentioned values originate from LSM.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (30 Apr 2020)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (28 May 2020) by Luis Samaniego

AR by Xianfeng Liu on behalf of the Authors (31 May 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (29 Jun 2020) by Luis Samaniego

Short summary

Freshwater availability is crucial for sustainable development across the Asian and eastern European regions. Our results indicate widespread decline in terrestrial water storage (TWS) over the region during 2002–2017, primarily due to the intensive over-extraction of groundwater and warmth-induced surface water loss. The findings provide insights into changes in TWS and its components over the Asian and eastern European regions, where there is growing demand for food grains and water supplies.