Suitability of 17 gridded rainfall and temperature datasets  for large-scale hydrological modelling in West Africa

Dembélé, Moctar; Schaefli, Bettina; van de Giesen, Nick; Mariéthoz, Grégoire

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-5379-2020

Articles | Volume 24, issue 11

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-5379-2020

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-5379-2020

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

Articles | Volume 24, issue 11

Research article

|

16 Nov 2020

Research article |

| 16 Nov 2020

Suitability of 17 gridded rainfall and temperature datasets for large-scale hydrological modelling in West Africa

Moctar Dembélé, Bettina Schaefli, Nick van de Giesen, and Grégoire Mariéthoz

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Final revised paper (published on 16 Nov 2020)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 28 Apr 2020)
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 of Dembélé et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 16 May 2020
- AC1: 'Reply to Anonymous Referee#1', Moctar Dembélé, 26 May 2020
RC2: 'Review', Nadav Peleg, 29 May 2020
- AC2: 'Reply to Referee#2 - Dr Nadav Peleg', Moctar Dembélé, 16 Jun 2020
AC3: 'Corrigendum for hess-2020-68', Moctar Dembélé, 19 Jun 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 Aug 2020) by Albrecht Weerts

AR by Moctar Dembélé on behalf of the Authors (12 Aug 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (17 Aug 2020) by Albrecht Weerts

RR by Nadav Peleg (23 Aug 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Dear Moctar Dembélé and co-authors,

Thank you for your detailed replies to my comments from the first round. Reading the revised manuscript, I found it improved in comparison to the original submission. There is one point that I feel can be still improved. Reading of the title and abstract, the paper still reads like a case-study specific to West Africa region. In your replies, you discussed the point that the need to investigate the suitability of different climatic dataset to the hydrology comes from the fact that you cannot compare the datasets to climatic ground stations due to their (lack of) availability. You do mention “data-scarce regions” as one of your keywords, but do not refer to this point in your paper. Why not emphasizing the lack of climatic data as your motivation to explore different combinations of climatic datasets? That will make your paper a bit less “case-study” oriented and more appealing to the general readers. Several small modifications will be required: changing the title from “Suitability of 17 rainfall and temperature gridded datasets for largescale hydrological modelling in West Africa” to something like “Suitability of 17 rainfall and temperature gridded datasets for largescale hydrological modelling in data-scarce regions”, for example. Of course, edits will be required in the abstract (adding one sentence likely) and a paragraph will need to be added in the introduction and discussion parts. This is just a suggestion - the paper can be accepted as is, but I really think that modifying the storyline a bit can make it more appealing.

Some other minor comments:

1. In section 2.4: I suggest adding information regarding data availability (stream gauges and climate stations) even if you decide not to change the storyline. Observed data is only reported in Figure 2 and is not detailed.

2. Figure 1. What do you mean by morphological datasets? And - why is it in plural? Was more than one “morphological” dataset used?

3. Figure 2. Consider replacing the blue colour of the Guinean zone with another colour as it is too similar to the colour of the river and lakes. In the figure caption, some words are required to describe panels (a) and (b). The legend of the elevation - I suggest removing the labels "High" and "Low", and adding a label for the 500 m elevation.

4. Table 3. The information presented here can be placed in the caption of Fig. 2 and the Table can be deleted.

Sincerely,
Nadav Peleg

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (07 Oct 2020) by Albrecht Weerts

AR by Moctar Dembélé on behalf of the Authors (08 Oct 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (09 Oct 2020) by Albrecht Weerts

AR by Moctar Dembélé on behalf of the Authors (09 Oct 2020) Manuscript

Short summary

This study evaluates 102 combinations of rainfall and temperature datasets from satellite and reanalysis sources as input to a fully distributed hydrological model. The model is recalibrated for each input dataset, and the outputs are evaluated with streamflow, evaporation, soil moisture and terrestrial water storage data. Results show that no single rainfall or temperature dataset consistently ranks first in reproducing the spatio-temporal variability of all hydrological processes.