More severe hydrological drought events emerge at different warming levels over the Wudinghe watershed in northern China

Jiao, Yang; Yuan, Xing

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-621-2019

Articles | Volume 23, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-621-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-621-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 23, issue 1

Research article

|

01 Feb 2019

Research article |

| 01 Feb 2019

More severe hydrological drought events emerge at different warming levels over the Wudinghe watershed in northern China

Yang Jiao and Xing Yuan

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Final revised paper (published on 01 Feb 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 16 Jul 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Comments to hess-2018-255 by Jiao and Yuan', Anonymous Referee #1, 20 Aug 2018
- AC1: 'Responses to the comments from Reviewer #1', Xing Yuan, 04 Sep 2018
RC2: 'Interesting drought analysis lacking important details', Anonymous Referee #2, 21 Aug 2018
- AC2: 'Responses to the comments from Reviewer #2', Xing Yuan, 04 Sep 2018

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by editor and referees) (27 Sep 2018) by Micha Werner

AR by Xing Yuan on behalf of the Authors (29 Sep 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by editor and referees) (18 Oct 2018) by Micha Werner

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (04 Nov 2018) by Micha Werner

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (06 Dec 2018)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (13 Dec 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Review for manuscript entitled "More Severe Hydrological Drought Events Emerge at Different Warming Levels over the Wudinghe Watershed in northern China"

In this revised manuscript, the authors have successfully addressed my
major concerns in my previous review. Most importantly, they are using
global temperature changes instead of local ones. They also included a
3 degree limit additionally to 1.5 and 2. Both of these improvements
significantly increase the appeal of the manusript to a wider
readership. The manuscript is overall well written. I still find that
the methods, in detail the processing of the input data, is not
described enough (see major comments below). As a result, I still
recommend major revisions. However, I believe that the authors should
face no difficulties providing this additional information and the
manuscript can be published subsequently.

Major comment:

l. 117ff: This paragraph describes the processing of the data
set. Important details are not mentioned. Questions that need to be
answered are:

1.) How are CMIP5 data and observations interpolated?
2.) How was the correction method by Li et al. modified?
3.) How was daily precipitation and temperature disaggregated to
6-hourly resolution using CRUNCEP data?
4.) It should be mentioned clearly that only precipitation and
temperature have been used from the CMIP5 models.
5.) What does it mean that other variables have been taken from
CRUNCEP? Have these been resampled somehow? Have climatological values
been used?

The last question regarding direct use of CRUNCEP data is critical
because it is not clear whether physical consistency among forcing
variables is maintained. For example, is shortwave radiation
influenced by precipitation? Please comment. Please also mention this
as a limitation of the study that it is unclear how the climate change
signal by GCMs might be affected by using CRUNCEP data for a majority
of forcing variables.

These details can be provided in an appendix.

l. 342ff: In this paragraph, please do not refer to warming levels
because those conflict with the RCP scenarios. For example, warming
levels are reached at different RCP scenarios at different points in
time. A statement such as that (l. 344ff: "RCPs scenario uncertainty
accounts for 14.3% of temperature uncertainty at 1.5 °C warming level
with this proportion increasing to 33% (63.7%) at 2 °C (3 °C) warming
level, while its contribution to precipitation uncertainty remains
less than 10%.") makes no sense because some RCP scenarios will not
reach 3 degrees. Please also remove the dashed lines indicating when
the ensemble reaches a warming level from Fig. 8.

Minor comments:

l. 342: "Model accounts..." . Please be more specific here and write
"GCM and land surface hydrological model ..."

Hide

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (22 Dec 2018) by Micha Werner

AR by Xing Yuan on behalf of the Authors (25 Dec 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (19 Jan 2019) by Micha Werner

Short summary

This paper projects future changes in drought characteristics under different warming levels over a semiarid watershed based on hydroclimate simulations. Despite large uncertainties from climate models, we find that less frequent but more severe hydrological drought events would occur in the near future, suggesting that different aspects of hydrological droughts should be carefully investigated when assessing the impact of global warming.