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Peer review report 1 on “Exceptionally extreme drought in Madeira Archipelago in 2012: vegetation impacts and driving conditions”
Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 217 (2016) 371
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Agricultural and Forest Meteorology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/agrformet
Peer Review Report
Peer review report 1 on “Exceptionally extreme drought in Madeira Archipelago in 2012: vegetation impacts and driving conditions”
1. Original Submission 1.1. Recommendation Major Revision 2. Comments to Author: What is the new science here? While the effects of the drought in 2011-2012 are interesting, what does your analysis contribute to the understanding of droughts that is not already known? Cut down some of the text and background material in the Introduction. Do the results in Table 2 support your first statement in Conclusions that frequency of droughts in southwestern Europe are increasing? Clearly, 2011-2012 was a severe drought, but does the historical record on the island support this notion of increased drought frequency? Specific comments line 319 – This table and figure does not present the data, but gives a description of the sites where data were collected. line 335 – the 5th and 95th percentile lines are a bit misleading because they only include a 30 year period. It is difficult to tell how unusual the drought year of 2011/12 was based on these percentile lines (5th and 95th). line 349 – “decile classification” – I see now from the supplemental material that some deciles were grouped, but this is not clear in the figure.
line 394 – Should read, “These times scales show. . ." Line 457 – Fig. 6A: Can you explain the positive NDVI anomaly (or lack of trends in NDVI) occurring mostly on the North side of the island? Also, what is the expected amount of variance in NDVI compared to your threshold − a difference in NDVI of −0.01? Line 477 – Since most of the fires were on the south side of the island, how much did this contribute to the decrease in NDVI? Earlier, the decrease in NDVI is attributed to drought. Line 534 – Table 5 – What does this table tell us given that all of the values for 2011-2012 are between the 10th and 90th percentiles? This leads the reader to believe that this drought year was not that unusual. 3. First revision 3.1. Recommendation Accept 4. Comments to the author I am satisfied with the authors’ response to both reviewers. The authors have greatly improved the paper in terms of 1) stating the new science and research objectives, 2) clarifying their results, particularly with improved figures, and 3) shortening the introduction. Research highlights are also now provided and make the purpose of the paper clear. Anonymous Available online 2 December 2016
DOI of published article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2016.08.010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2016.11.202 0168-1923/
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Agricultural and Forest Meteorology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/agrformet
Peer Review Report
Peer review report 1 on “Exceptionally extreme drought in Madeira Archipelago in 2012: vegetation impacts and driving conditions”
1. Original Submission 1.1. Recommendation Major Revision 2. Comments to Author: What is the new science here? While the effects of the drought in 2011-2012 are interesting, what does your analysis contribute to the understanding of droughts that is not already known? Cut down some of the text and background material in the Introduction. Do the results in Table 2 support your first statement in Conclusions that frequency of droughts in southwestern Europe are increasing? Clearly, 2011-2012 was a severe drought, but does the historical record on the island support this notion of increased drought frequency? Specific comments line 319 – This table and figure does not present the data, but gives a description of the sites where data were collected. line 335 – the 5th and 95th percentile lines are a bit misleading because they only include a 30 year period. It is difficult to tell how unusual the drought year of 2011/12 was based on these percentile lines (5th and 95th). line 349 – “decile classification” – I see now from the supplemental material that some deciles were grouped, but this is not clear in the figure.
line 394 – Should read, “These times scales show. . ." Line 457 – Fig. 6A: Can you explain the positive NDVI anomaly (or lack of trends in NDVI) occurring mostly on the North side of the island? Also, what is the expected amount of variance in NDVI compared to your threshold − a difference in NDVI of −0.01? Line 477 – Since most of the fires were on the south side of the island, how much did this contribute to the decrease in NDVI? Earlier, the decrease in NDVI is attributed to drought. Line 534 – Table 5 – What does this table tell us given that all of the values for 2011-2012 are between the 10th and 90th percentiles? This leads the reader to believe that this drought year was not that unusual. 3. First revision 3.1. Recommendation Accept 4. Comments to the author I am satisfied with the authors’ response to both reviewers. The authors have greatly improved the paper in terms of 1) stating the new science and research objectives, 2) clarifying their results, particularly with improved figures, and 3) shortening the introduction. Research highlights are also now provided and make the purpose of the paper clear. Anonymous Available online 2 December 2016
DOI of published article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2016.08.010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2016.11.202 0168-1923/