Quantifying the effects of land use  and model  scale on water partitioning and water ages  using tracer-aided ecohydrological models

Smith, Aaron; Tetzlaff, Doerthe; Kleine, Lukas; Maneta, Marco; Soulsby, Chris

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-2239-2021

Articles | Volume 25, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-2239-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Water, isotope and solute fluxes in the soil–plant–atmosphere...

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-2239-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 25, issue 4

Research article

|

26 Apr 2021

Research article |

| 26 Apr 2021

Quantifying the effects of land use and model scale on water partitioning and water ages using tracer-aided ecohydrological models

Aaron Smith, Doerthe Tetzlaff, Lukas Kleine, Marco Maneta, and Chris Soulsby

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Final revised paper (published on 26 Apr 2021)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 31 Oct 2020)
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Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Referee comments', Anonymous Referee #1, 27 Nov 2020
- AC1: 'Response to RC1', Aaron Smith, 11 Jan 2021
RC2: 'Reviewer Comments for HESS-220-539', Anonymous Referee #2, 23 Dec 2020
- AC2: 'Response to RC2', Aaron Smith, 11 Jan 2021

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by editor and referees) (22 Jan 2021) by Lixin Wang

AR by Aaron Smith on behalf of the Authors (26 Jan 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (03 Feb 2021) by Lixin Wang

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (09 Feb 2021)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Title: Quantifying the effects of land-use and model scale on water partitioning and water ages using tracer-aided ecohydrological models

Authors: Smith et al.

Recommendation: Accept

Assessment:

I thank the authors for their work in responding to my comments. I find the paper to be acceptable for publication. I suggest a few, mostly typographical corrections and suggestions below.

Minor comments:
L55-57: Here the authors stated that water isotopes have been used as tools across various regions and Spatio-temporal scales. The citations for this statement, however, are not representative e.g. Coenders-Gerrits study shows a global analysis and Jasechko study also shows a global analysis with a detailed study case in China while Kool study discusses about the method. Therefore, I suggest adding more references for isotope study in different regions e.g. in the US and EU.

L64-65: Grammatically error: the word “been” is used twice.

L93: I suggest the authors provide the author name for ERA5 reference instead of ERA5, 2020. The author can refer to the ERA5 publication by Hersbach et al., 2020:
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.3803

My Comments below are addressed for supplementary material:

L23: Please change the words “remotely sensed data” into “remote sensing data”.

L24: The authors may revise the sentence into: “Soil moisture simulations were inconsistent for both re-analysis data (ERA5) and field measurements,………”

L35: I suggest to provide information about the abbreviations used in Figure 3 (e.g. BE, GL, PE, PZ, etc) either in the text before or in the figure caption. This information can be found later in L89-90.

L94-96: The authors seem to forget to change the description of the colors when they reversed the colors in Figure S5.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (01 Mar 2021)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (05 Mar 2021) by Lixin Wang

AR by Aaron Smith on behalf of the Authors (05 Mar 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (08 Mar 2021) by Lixin Wang

AR by Aaron Smith on behalf of the Authors (14 Mar 2021)

Short summary

We used a tracer-aided ecohydrological model on a mixed land use catchment in northeastern Germany to quantify water flux–storage–age interactions at four model grid resolutions. The model's ability to reproduce spatio-temporal flux–storage–age interactions decreases with increasing model grid sizes. Similarly, larger model grids showed vegetation-influenced changes in blue and green water partitioning. Simulations reveal the value of measured soil and stream isotopes for model calibration.