Articles | Volume 30, issue 11
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-30-3675-2026
© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Satellite Data Rendered Irrigation using Penman–Monteith and SEBAL – sDRIPS for Surface Water Irrigation Optimization
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- Final revised paper (published on 16 Jun 2026)
- Supplement to the final revised paper
- Preprint (discussion started on 16 Oct 2025)
- Supplement to the preprint
Interactive discussion
Status: closed
Comment types: AC – author | RC – referee | CC – community | EC – editor | CEC – chief editor
| : Report abuse
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RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-4574', Anonymous Referee #1, 08 Dec 2025
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Shahzaib Khan, 11 Jan 2026
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RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-4574', Anonymous Referee #2, 22 Dec 2025
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Shahzaib Khan, 11 Jan 2026
Peer review completion
AR – Author's response | RR – Referee report | ED – Editor decision | EF – Editorial file upload
ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (24 Jan 2026) by Shraddhanand Shukla
AR by Shahzaib Khan on behalf of the Authors (24 Jan 2026)
Author's response
Author's tracked changes
Manuscript
ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (27 Feb 2026) by Shraddhanand Shukla
RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (10 Apr 2026)
RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (28 Apr 2026)
ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (29 May 2026) by Shraddhanand Shukla
AR by Shahzaib Khan on behalf of the Authors (30 May 2026)
Author's response
Manuscript
The authors propose a framework for providing spatially distributed irrigation advices by leveraging Earth Observation, which is for sure a timely topic in the broader context of water resources management. However, three main issues critically affect the manuscript quality:
1. Implementation over just few days/weeks. This is a gap, at least an entire irrigation season should be covered to prove the method robustness. Fig. 8 is where a 3-month period is shown for the first time, but it is not clear whether it is a whole season or not. Since water allocation managers often have control on seasonal volumes, I believe that comparing seasonal-aggregated advices with availabilities is meaningful.
2. Validation: even though I appreciate authors’ efforts in this sense, it is not carried out in a rigorous way. It targets other areas (with different climate conditions) and likely different vegetation/crop patterns. In addition, SEBAL, which is the basis for ET calculation for sDRIPS, is involved in OpenET also. If a direct validation is not possible, authors should just look for and mention previous studies validating SEBAL in several climate context (possibly involving the one of interest) to support the method reliability.
3. Manuscript organization: the paper is too long and a bit confused in several parts.
Please find additional comments as follows:
L 90-94: some initiatives to fill this gap are under development, e.g., ESA (European Space Agency) WorldCereal (https://esa-worldcereal.org/en)
L 138-147: it concerns data used, should not be in the introduction
L 149-186: should be sharply shortened
L 198-204: keep units’ consistency and use the International System
Eq 2: here is an underlying assumption that evaporation from bare soil is negligible, the Kc you are calculating is basically Kcb. If so, please detail on this. A question on top of this. At this stage soil moisture is already needed to compute Ks, isn’t it?
L 334-336: sounds like results
Fig 4: it seems that some coarse resolution input drives this result
Soil Moisture: how was it calculated? This is an important omission. In addition, it is expressed as water height (mm). This implies that the reference volume is known. Soil layer is fixed at 100 mm (as seen by Figures), what about the porosity?
Eq 6: maybe you could directly mention this one instead of eq 5 – which is a specific case of eq 6
Fig 5: How did you handle soil moisture estimate at the command area level?
Eq 7: even though it is explained afterwards, this equation could be misleading, as rainfall reduces net water requirement
L 399-400: this should be proved
L 474-484: not needed
L 495: more details on this in the “Data” Section?
Fig 9 and 10: On top of the criticism to the significance of validation, description here is qualitative only, as no metrics are provided