Sensitivity of future continental United States water deficit projections to
general circulation models, the evapotranspiration estimation method, and the
greenhouse gas emission scenario

Chang, Seungwoo; Graham, Wendy D.; Hwang, Syewoon; Muñoz-Carpena, Rafael

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-20-3245-2016

Articles | Volume 20, issue 8

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-20-3245-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-20-3245-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 20, issue 8

Research article

|

10 Aug 2016

Research article |

| 10 Aug 2016

Sensitivity of future continental United States water deficit projections to general circulation models, the evapotranspiration estimation method, and the greenhouse gas emission scenario

Seungwoo Chang, Wendy D. Graham, Syewoon Hwang, and Rafael Muñoz-Carpena

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Final revised paper (published on 10 Aug 2016)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 15 Jan 2016)
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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: 'Review of Sensitivity of future water availability projections to Global Climate Model, by Chang et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 26 Feb 2016
- AC1: 'Author’s response letter for “Sensitivity of future Continental United States water deficit projections to General Circulation Model, evapotranspiration estimation method, and greenhouse gas emission scenario” by S. Chang et al.', Seungwoo Chang, 13 Apr 2016
RC2: 'comments on "Sensitivity of future water availability projections to Global Climate Model, evapotranspiration estimation method, and greenhouse gas emission scenario" by Chang et al', Anonymous Referee #2, 12 Mar 2016
- AC2: 'Author’s response letter for “Sensitivity of future Continental United States water deficit projections to General Circulation Model, evapotranspiration estimation method, and greenhouse gas emission scenario” by S. Chang et al.', Seungwoo Chang, 13 Apr 2016

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (15 Apr 2016) by Wouter Buytaert

AR by Lorena Grabowski on behalf of the Authors (19 Apr 2016) Author's response

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (12 May 2016) by Wouter Buytaert

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (10 Jun 2016)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have well addressed most of the shortcomings pointed out by the reviewers. I would propose only several changes on literatures summary, motivation description and manuscript structure the authors still need to make before it is considered for publication in HESS.

Introduction.

Lines 67-75. Although the authors have summarized some literatures on that future ET0 projections have been shown to depend on ET0 estimation methods in addition to GCMs, here, the authors appear to miss some new literatures on the impact of different combinations between methods and GCM data on projecting ET0 (e.g., Wang et al., 2015).

Lines 95. Given a large number of publications on future ET0 projection, the motivation of this study should be further explain to emphasize what new contribution it makes to the field, rather than only stated that “adds to the literature”.

Result

Although the authors divide the results into several paragraphs, it maybe not clear enough for reader. Therefore, it will be better to give the suitable titles for sub-sections

Conclusion

I would prefer a shorter conclusion, this one is more like a summary. Some discussion about future research (e.g., Lines 407-413) should be moved to the discussion section.
Moreover, the authors need realize that some recent literatures have done the related work on weighting the results of the ensemble of GCMs when projecting ET0 (e.g., Xing et al., 2014).

Figures

Figure 8 missed the scale of x-axis.

Used literatures.

[1] Wang W, Xing W., Shao Q., 2015. How large are uncertainties in future projection of reference evapotranspiration through different approaches? Journal of Hydrology, 524, 696-700
[2] Xing W., Wang W., Shao Q., Peng S., Yu Z., Yong B, Taylor J., 2014. Changes of reference evapotranspiration in the Haihe River Basin: Present observations and future projection from climatic variables through multi-model ensemble. Global and Planetary Change, 115, 1-15.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (Editor review) (14 Jun 2016) by Wouter Buytaert

AR by Anna Mirena Feist-Polner on behalf of the Authors (22 Jun 2016) Author's response

ED: Publish as is (14 Jul 2016) by Wouter Buytaert

Short summary

Projecting water deficit depends on how researchers combine possible future climate scenarios such as general circulation models (GCMs), evapotranspiration estimation method (ET), and greenhouse gas emission scenarios. Using global sensitivity analysis, we found the relative contribution of each of these factors to projecting future water deficit and the choice of ET estimation method are as important as the choice of GCM, and greenhouse gas emission scenario is less influential than the others.