Long-term water stress and drought assessment of Mediterranean oak savanna vegetation using thermal remote sensing

González-Dugo, María P.; Chen, Xuelong; Andreu, Ana; Carpintero, Elisabet; Gómez-Giraldez, Pedro J.; Carrara, Arnaud; Su, Zhongbo

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-755-2021

Articles | Volume 25, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-755-2021

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

Special issue:

Data acquisition and modelling of hydrological, hydrogeological...

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-755-2021

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

Articles | Volume 25, issue 2

Research article

|

18 Feb 2021

Research article |

| 18 Feb 2021

Long-term water stress and drought assessment of Mediterranean oak savanna vegetation using thermal remote sensing

María P. González-Dugo, Xuelong Chen, Ana Andreu, Elisabet Carpintero, Pedro J. Gómez-Giraldez, Arnaud Carrara, and Zhongbo Su

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Final revised paper (published on 18 Feb 2021)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 26 May 2020)

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-2020-190', Anonymous Referee #1, 12 Jun 2020
- AC1: 'Authors' response Referee #1', Maria P. González-Dugo, 20 Aug 2020
RC2: 'Review of the manuscript HESS-2020-190', Anonymous Referee #2, 15 Jul 2020
- AC2: 'Authors' response Referee #2', Maria P. González-Dugo, 20 Aug 2020
RC3: 'Review of HESS-2020-190'', Anonymous Referee #3, 15 Jul 2020
- AC3: 'Authors' response Referee #3', Maria P. González-Dugo, 20 Aug 2020

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by editor and referees) (03 Sep 2020) by Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen

AR by Lorena Grabowski on behalf of the Authors (17 Oct 2020) Author's response

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (23 Oct 2020) by Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (22 Nov 2020)

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (03 Dec 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

General Comments
The manuscript presents a long-term analysis to characterize the impact of water stress on the dehesa region of Spain. Overall, study was well designed, the paper is well written, and the results and conclusions are fully supported. Additionally, the authors provided thoughtful responses to the comments regarding the earlier iteration of the manuscript. Thus, it is recommended that the paper should be accepted once the authors have addressed the handful of additional and relatively minor comments listed below.

Specific Comments
1. Line 43: The sentence beginning "However, the slow ..." could be better expressed as "However, the slow onset of drought, the large extension of savanna areas, and their complex canopy structure introduce additional difficulties to the challenge of monitoring drought and assessing its adverse effects."

2. Line 55: The sentence beginning "In particular, the ..." could be expressed more clearly as "In particular, the SEBS (Surface Energy Balance System) model (Su, 2002) presents a good compromise between the detailed parameterization the turbulent heat fluxes for different states of the land surface and minimizing the input requirements of the model without the need for local calibration. "

3. Line 69: The sentence beginning “Mediterranean oaks have …” could read more simply as “Mediterranean oaks can minimize the effects of water scarcity through a combination of physiological mechanisms that occur over a range of time scales Rambal (1993).”

4. Line 150: How were the input changed for monthly flux estimates?

5. Line 187: The hyphens in “root mean square error” are unnecessary and should be omitted. Similarly, the should be deleted in the “mean bias error’ below.

6. Line 197: Replace "than" with "as".

7. Line 232: The RMSE for this study are modest and likely falls within the expected uncertainty of the measurements themselves. Also, since the model forces closure of the, most of the error in the turbulent fluxes can be attributed to the propagation of errors in the model estimates of Rn and G. This could be worth noting.

8. Line 264: What were these hypotheses?

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (12 Dec 2020) by Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen

AR by Maria P. González-Dugo on behalf of the Authors (21 Dec 2020) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (23 Dec 2020) by Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen

Short summary

Drought is a devastating natural hazard and difficult to define, detect and quantify. Global meteorological data and remote-sensing products present new opportunities to characterize drought in an objective way. In this paper, we applied the surface energy balance model SEBS to estimate monthly evapotranspiration (ET) from 2001 to 2018 over the dehesa area of the Iberian Peninsula. ET anomalies were used to identify the main drought events and analyze their impacts on dehesa vegetation.